In By Way of the Moonlight by Elizabeth Musser, Allie Massey’s grandmother, known as Nana Dale, has just died. Nana Dale was an accomplished horsewoman, placing first in several shows and even riding in the Olympics. Their plan had always been that Allie would inherit the grounds, house, and enough money to open an equine therapy business on her grandmother’s property.

But the family learns at the reading of the will that Nana Dale sold the property to a development firm, evidently taken advantage of in her beginning dementia by an unscrupulous contractor.

Now Allie has a limited time to clear the house and have an estate sale before the house is imploded.

Allie is beyond upset. She can’t cope. She even breaks up with her fiance. Nana Dale had left a letter with cryptic instructions to find a cherrywood chest which will have more information. But no one in the family has seen such a chest.

In intermittent flashbacks, we learn of Dale’s life. She had loved horses from her earliest memories. But her father’s business crashed along with the economy during the Depression, and the horses had to be sold. Dale prayed long years that she might find Essie, her beloved filly.

Before the Depression, when her family boarded horses, Dale met a boy named Tommy with a horse named Infinity. The two became friends, even competing as a couple in some events.

The rest of Dale’s story takes us through Tommy’s bout with polio, mounted patrols along the coast during WWII called Sand Pounders, and a daring rescue of a sailor whose ship was torpedoed, which resulted in a major surprise.

In one interview, Elizabeth said part of the story was inspired by her mother’s property in Atlanta. In a series of short videos, Elizabeth takes readers through various areas of the house and grounds that were inspiration for the novel, which was fun to see. She said that there is pressure now, just like in the book, for owners of such properties to sell to developers who want to raze the buildings and put up new cluster houses.

The WWII and Sand Pounders sections of the book are not Elizabeth’s mother’s history. But when she happened upon information about the coastal mounted patrol, she wanted to include them in her book.

Elizabeth says later in her interview that in this book she wanted to “examine the thin line between fighting for what you believe in and developing an unhealthy obsession. Both women learn important lessons about pursuing dreams at all costs, which may cause them to sacrifice something or someone they love.”

I listened to the audiobook read by Susan Bennett. I thought Susan did a great job with the character voices, but the narration seemed too slow. Maybe she thought that was fitting for a Southern accent (the next audiobook I started is also read by Susan, but at a much more normal pace). Also, she had an annoying habit of turning one-syllable words into two syllables, especially at the end of sentences (not to be nitpicky, but after 14+ hours of listening, some things grate). The audiobook didn’t provide any back matter, so I am thankful Elizabeth included information and links to interviews here.

The story itself also seemed a little slow, especially the modern-day part. There’s almost no movement in plot in Allie’s story until near the end.

Nevertheless, overall, this was a good book. One of my favorite quotes, and themes, in the book is “When life gets hard to stand, kneel.”

Another: “Bitterness will rot out your soul. . . You may never get the answer on this side of life to the why. So it’s much better to ask the question, ‘Now that I’m in this place, Lord, what do you want me to do?'”

And “Life ain’t fair. It’s brutal sometimes. . . faith don’t stop the horrible things. But faith helps you walk through those things, whipped and angry and screaming on the inside. Lord don’t mind our screaming and raging. He done shown us how to do it in those psalms of his that King David wrote.”

Elizabeth is one of my favorite authors. Even though I like some of her other books better than this one, I did enjoy this one and can highly recommend it as well.