I have spent the past week reading about the Creed Family and have loved every minute of it, right down to the last few pages where I shed joyful tears for a family who just has gotten it all right.
I loved reading books by Linda Lael Miller. They are filled with characters that are the sort of people you wished were real. Who knows--maybe in Texas and Colorado there are people like the Creeds and the Mekettricks. At least I hope there are people like these characters out there in the real world. I always leave these books with the desire to run away to a small town in Texas so that I can be part of a community where everyone knows everyone else, where everyone pitches in when a family needs it, and where everyone genuinely cares about the safety and well being of everyone else. And, if the cowboys really looked like the ones on the covers of these books...well, that would just be a bonus, now wouldn't it?
Seriously, though, the Creed Trilogy was a good one and worth reading if reading about cowboys is your kind of thing. I did not read them in the correct order because I was having a hard time finding the first one. So, I read the second one first and the first one second. The order really doesn't matter for the first two books, but be sure to ready the 3rd one last. You'd learn too much too soon if you read it any earlier.
The Creed books are about 3 men: Steven, Conner, and Brody (don't you love that name?). Conner and Brody are identical twins. As a child, Steven lived most of the year with his mother and spent only the summers on the Creed Ranch. Conner and Brody lost their parents when they were babies and were raised by their uncle, Davis, and his new wife Kim. Steven is actually their cousin and is the son of Davis. Obviously, all of what I have just recorded creates the most wonderful literary "baggage" for these three boys/men who have a lot to struggle with and move beyond in order to become the kind of men their families expect them to be: stable, husbands, fathers, ranchers.
They are, however, no ordinary men. I think this is exactly why we women read about them. They are extraordinarily good looking, extremely wealthy, and are just the three nicest guys on the planet. What woman in her right mind would not be fighting her best friend for the job of wife to any one of these three men? Well, there is a little fighting over them, but not amongst friends. Friends just don't behave that way. It wouldn't matter anyway. Once a Creed man sets his sights on a lady, he pretty much ends up with her in the end. But, she's always the woman you were pulling for from the beginning. She's the kind and gentle soul who never thought a Creed could love her. It's the perfect love story. Times three.
I think these books touched my heart in ways that Miller's books typically have not done before because they spoke to the issue of strong families and enduring families. While these books are wonderful stories, as you read them you are continuously reminded that they are just stories. However, Davis and Brody, in book 3, speak a lot to the subject of families: how few are perfect, how all will have struggles to overcome, and how it's necessary to pull together to make a fmaily work and survive. How refreshing to read something like that in a cowboy book where everything seems perfect! It made me really think about my own family--the one that lives in my house with me and all of the other members besides. We are not perfect. (If we were I wouldn't need to read stories about people who are in order to escape my all too real life...) But we love each other and we care about each other. We will pull together when people need extra help, we will come together for weddings and when babies are born, we will fight and we will make up. We are a family and that's what families do. Thank you, Linda Lael Miller and The Creed Family, for reminding me that my family is a pretty good one, too!
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