The Hope of Refuge (Ada's House Series #1) Book

I have really mixed feelings on this book. I not only didn't like the female main character, at times I actually hated her. She was mean, selfish, rude, not able to look at life from anyone else's perspective, even to the point of destroying the lives of other people, a liar and a thief, etc. And she blamed it all on the way she grew up: abandoned, placed in foster care, a teen runaway with a stalker. The thing that frustrated me the most is that she refused to take any responsibility for her bad choices. Everything was blamed on her background. Her behavior was even excused by others because of her background. Well, we make choices. We cannot always choose our circumstances, but we can always choose our attitude, our response to our circumstances. The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg, as the saying goes. Many have grown up in foster care and turned out just fine. Not everyone who is abandoned turns into a bitter shrew. Perhaps the author wanted to show how bad Cara was in order to show how important her transformation was. But I just couldn't feel any sympathy for the woman, and definitely couldn't see what in the world the main male character Ephraim saw in her. Did he allow her physical beauty to blind him to her character?

I also found it difficult to believe how many sad, sick, secrets were at work in this Amish community. Yes, everyone has problems, but it seemed that every family in the community had some really negative stuff going on, and it finally got tiring to hear about all their problems.

Also, there were so many stories intertwined in this book, I found it a little difficult to keep them all straight, and they weren't all resolved in this book, so the author obviously intended this as a series. I did go ahead and begin the sequel, and I am liking it somewhat better. I listened to this as an audiobook.