Review: The Fryeburg Chronicles by June O’Donal.

This was an interesting book for me because it’s a historical history story of a place I frequently visited over the years. Fryeburg, Maine is where they have held the largest summer festival (Fair) in Maine for many years. The story is way before my time but a lot of the reading was looking back how the town began and flourished to the place it is today. The author clearly develops and weaves a deep, tender and insightful story in an early colonial setting.

It’s a story about a homesteading family built around warmth, passion, and acceptance. The author captures and breathes real value into the lives of a family through faith and Christianity and never loses touch with the presence of duty, hard work and discipline weaved within the story of that time. She takes the reader into a daily routine of life in their home and makes you feel like your sitting among the family. June O’Donal did her research well and that is what made the story interesting.

The story starts out with the mother and her seven year-old daughter Abigail becoming very sick. The daughter did die and it took Sarah longer to recover from her illness but losing her daughter kept her down for quite a while longer. James, the father and their three sons knew that they had to accept what happened and continue on with their daily chores but there wasn’t a day that they didn’t miss Abigail.

Not long after that a young relative, Grace Peabody, a nine year-old came to stay with them until her father came home from the war. She was brought up wealthy so this type of lifestyle wasn’t familiar to her. She started off on the wrong foot but Sarah set her straight on who gives the orders and Grace turned out to be a big help to the family in many ways. She learned to do chores and learned all the old-fashion things like, sewing, baking, cooking, spinning wool into fabric, cleaning the house and she seemed amazed at how they did things on a farm and enjoyed learning whatever Sarah taught her.

It was a refreshing story with ups and downs as any average family who owns a farm but they were happy most of the time. The eldest son, Ben, the oldest was smart and wanted to be a lawyer, the middle son wanted to follow in his father’s steps and become a farmer, and the youngest son wanted to become a carpenter. All the boys were headed in the right direction of becoming who they wanted to be but could only study after the farm chores were completed for the day. The family made very few trips into town but I did recognize some of the areas the author wrote about. I read a lot of information on things that my grandparents use to make by hand. The book was almost like a history lesson…
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