Home By Nightfall by Alexis Harrington Review & Giveaway

HOME BY NIGHTFALL returns readers to the small Oregon town of Powell Springs, the setting of Harrington’s highly praised Home by Morning, which introduced the Braddock family and others in the town struggling on the home front at the end of WWI as the flu pandemic rages around the world. There, Susannah Braddock has made peace with the loss of her soldier husband, Riley, who died in France. She’s been looking after Riley’s father and running the family’s horse farm with the help of hired hand Tanner Grenfell. When their turns to love, they marry, committing their lives to running the farm and raising Tanner’s two young nephews. Their happiness is short lived.


 Two years after being reported dead, Riley Braddock returns home, shell-shocked and with no memory of his life before the war. All he can remember is Veronique, the French woman who rescued him and nursed him back to health. Plagued by memories and nightmares of the War, he has returned to a life and a wife he no longer knows. The joy his family is not enough to heal his wounds. For Susannah, the best intentions of her brother and sister-in-law and the outright resentment and animosity of the old man she’s cared for of her the irascible old man she tries to care only bring more anguish as she is torn between her love for Tanner and her loyalty to Riley.

First I will say that if you haven't read the first book, Home by Morning, you should definitely do so before you pick up Home by Nightfall.  I didn't, and I sorely wished I had.  Harrington does an adept job of creating a standalone novel, but I still felt like I was missing some key elements, namely background information for some of the characters.

That said though, Home by Nightfall is almost impossible to put down.  The characters are so realistic, and I wasn't sure who I wanted to have a happy ending more.  Harrington slowly builds her world and the characters within it, bringing the reader along on an emotional and memorable journey.   I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to re-reading it again after I go back and read Home by Nightfall.  Well recommended!

I live in the Pacific Northwest with one cat, a dog, a finch, and three chickens. When I'm not at one computer or another, I love to cook (too much) and bake, do fine needlework, sew, and a variety of things I never knew I could. In summer 2008 I built a hen house. I own power tools----my mom made me learn my way around a toolbox when I was a kid. She said a woman never knows when she might need the knowledge, and she's right! I've got my eye on a reciprocating saw at Home Depot . . .

However, also I love all things Victorian, lace, flowers, and furbelows, gorgeous, ornate table settings and rich, creamy stationery and fine writing instruments.

I'm SO not a morning person. I'm usually up late enough to hear the morning paper delivered. If I have a morning meeting, I worry about getting up early all night and can't sleep.

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