Despite her sister's concerns, Harriet Beecher doesn't question that her married life with Calvin Stowe will be full of happiness, family, independence and literary opportunities. Just two months into their marriage, though, Harriet finds herself overwhelmed with household responsibilities she detests, pregnant, and having to bid her new husband farewell as he embarks on a long European trip. Between Calvin's high domestic expectations of Harriet and his tendency to compare her to his first, beloved wife, Harriet begins to wonder is she is capable of being the wife Calvin needs, as well as the woman she needs herself to be. After months apart, the addition of children to their family, and constant financial struggles, will Harriet and Calvin remember how to cherish one another despite their extreme temperamental differences?

Josi S. Kilpack tells yet another gut-wrenchingly beautiful story based on the life of acclaimed author Harriet Beecher Stowe in All That Makes Life Bright. Words cannot express how much I adored this book. Kilpack does a flawless job alternately portraying both Calvin and Harriet in realistic and sympathetic ways. Neither one is always in the right, and thus the novel perfectly exemplifies the daily struggles of the early years of marriage. Are Calvin's expectations reasonable, or overbearing? Both. Is Harriet a wife and mother, or an author? Both. Every stay-at-home mother will shed a tear reading of Harriet's struggles to find an identity outside that of a cook/housekeeper/nanny... as well as the accompanying guilt associated with those feelings. It's as if Kilpack had read my own diary. Perfection. Absolute perfection.

I enjoyed the romantic aspect of this book and thought it was realistic in portraying the struggle to make a marriage work. While a lot of romances focus on the relationship before marriage, it was interesting to see how to develop and nurture love after the wedding. While there was a more serious, darker tone, to this book than a lot of romances (due to the worry and heavy feelings of Hattie and Calvin as they struggle to make their marriage work), I found that to be refreshing and realistic--and ultimately, hopeful, because relationships aren't all sunshine and roses, and they do take work and effort and sometime they're just hard. I think Kilpack did a great job conveying the struggles and emotions, particularly Hattie's struggles with feeling like she's losing herself as she tries to care for her family. Very well done.

A great fictionalization of Harriet Beecher Stowe's early years of marriage. Very well written

This was a very different romance. It starts with the wedding and follows this couple, which just happens to be the author Harriet Beecher Stowe and her new husband, as they traverse the first two years of their marriage. Though the couple has already found their love and are already married that doesn't mean it is happily ever after. Harriet and Calvin are two very different people with opposing views on how the house should function. Harriet wants to think deap thoughts and write about the events and sentiments of the day and not be tied down to the day to day chores of running the household while Calvin wants to return home from work and find his home in well order and a hot meal on the table. These differences become even more accute when a set of twins arrive less than a year after the wedding and once Calvin returns from his 9 month European trip.

I thought the feelings of both Calvin and Harriet were well writen and relateable. The joining together of two lives and two ways of thinking and doing things is difficult. Each thinks they are right and that the other is just being selfish when in reality both are being selfish. I really enjoyed that Kilpack didn't pick sides and presented each simpatheticly. Calvin was not painted as a tyrant and Harriet was not drawn as completely self obsorbed. The love they had for one another and the desire to make things work was evident throughout the story. The chosen paths each takes to try to "make things work" are certainly shown to be less effective. I really appreciated the epilogue which gave us a glimpse of how their adjustments and compromises took the family. This makes me what to know more about this author and her life as well as pull Uncle Tom's Cabin off the shelf and read it again, this time not as an assignment for school. It will be even more effective not that I am a mother with children of my own.

This story resonated with me as a wife and mother. When I began reading this novel, I expected it to explain how Mrs. Stowe's experiences as an abolitionist motivated her to write <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i>. While this novel did depict how residents of the free state of Ohio dealt with the volatile issue of slavery, it focused mainly on the marital relationship between Calvin and Harriet Stowe. This reader would recommend the study of this novel to all engaged couples. It should be required reading during premarital counseling.

In this novel, we witness the first two years of the marriage of Calvin and Harriet Stowe. Harriet marries against her older sister's wishes. Catharine Beecher, a confirmed spinster, warns Harriet that she's giving up a promising writing career to do what any woman without her talent could do. She tells Harriet her voice will be drowned out by the cries of babies and the opinions of her husband. Harriet, naive and inexperienced in running a household, ignores her sister's words of caution, confident she's marrying a man who values her talent as a writer.

Most married women, including this reviewer, could tell you just how right Harriet's sister was. The man you date is not the man you marry. Being husband and wife is quite different from being engaged or simply dating. The responsibilities of marriage bring new roles and expectations to a relationship. Becoming one is not a seamless transition. It take a lot of hard work, sacrifice, and compromise. Having grown up in a home with servants, Harriet was ill-equipped to live up to her husband's expectations for a wife. We later learn his first wife, Eliza, was the ideal wife. Harriet engages in some childish antics to express her frustration with her husband's criticism. When he invites his mother to live with them for a few weeks to teach Harriet how to manage a home and their twin daughters, things reach a boiling point. After spending a month in the country, Harriet returns home with a new sense of self, determined to put her family first while taking advantage of rare quiet moments to continue writing. I was impressed with the concessions Calvin Stowe was willing to make to improve his marriage. Most husbands during the Victorian era or our modern era would not be that understanding.

Harriet Beecher Stowe came from a very religious family. Her father was the president of Lane Seminary, and her husband was a biblical professor at the seminary. The influence of faith is woven throughout the conflicts and resolutions in this novel. In the epilogue, the vision that inspired Harriet to write <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> is explained in a fictional story. After the epilogue, the author devotes several pages to explaining which aspects of each chapter are based on actual facts and which aspects are the creations of her imagination.

I was given an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

All That Makes Life Bright, Josi S. Kilpack

Review from Jeannie Zelos book reviews

Genre:  Romance,

 When I saw this for review the names seemed familiar to me but I passed that off as being typical historical names. Then I started it and found that Harriet was the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book many believed to be the force for change, pushing up the agenda for the abolition of slavery.
I haven't ever actually read that book...but its free on kindle so I read a few chapters last night. 

I loved the way Harriet was so convinced everything would work out just as she and Calvin planned. What's that saying "man proposes God disposes"?
Well, she soon found the truth of that. It wasn't long before she and Calvin were struggling, she with trying to cope with home and housework, Calvin's and others expectations of her now, the change in finance and finding time to write.
It seemed to her all the things Catherine had said that she rubbished were coming true. Calvin still adored her and she him, but they simply didn't understand the others views, issues, problems. Then The Trip occurs just as she finds she's pregnant....

Its a wonderful read if you want to see the struggles women of the time had to remain themsleves, to keep their sense of worth, not just become wife, mother, daughter and lose themsleves in the unending drudge of home making. Its a balance of expectations on all parts, leveled with realistic practicalities. Calvin and Harriet are both very stubborn, both convinced they are right and its a real head to head theme at times. He supported her wring in theory, she was convinced she'd continue, its so easy when its all abstracts and theory but throw in Real Life and its very different.

It takes something huge to force them to make the change, to respect each others views, to find a way forward that allows them to still share their love and respect the other person. 
Its a snippet of the times when slavery was just becoming seen as abhorrent by the enlightened few, but accepted as natural but many. It was hard sometimes reading this book of almost 200 years past, and knowing that there are people who still hold that same bigoted view :-( 

I enjoyed reading this, it wasn't a heart stopping romance, more a gentle view from the sidelines on two peoples struggle to make their romance work.
In a way the categorisation of romance is misleading, its a book with romance in, it's a story of how life in that time was in practical terms for the duo. 
It's more a novel of two very strong willed, intelligent people falling in love and learning to live together without one subjugating the other.
Its not a book I'd reread but one I did enjoy very much. 


Stars: Four, an interesting look at the early life of a very famous woman, how here writings became a catalyst for change.
It made me wonder what would have happened if Calvin stuck to his original stance and Harriet gave up her writing. 

ARC supplied for review purposes by Netgalley and Publishers