For Love Alone

For Love Alone


This book concludes the story of the Trevor family, with Mallory being the main character, and her older brother Matthew, and her parents Colin and Janna, being great secondary characters. As I’ve written these ongoing series, I’ve learned to love the way the main characters take on such great supporting roles in later books. Seeing the family go through more challenges also makes the stories more realistic, or closer to real life. Each book has a happy ending, but we see as the story continues that real life often takes us from one trial to another, and the real happy endings occur in the next life as we live faithfully for those blessings.


In this book, I addressed three huge issues: pornography, suicide, and interracial marriage. Can you guess which one I got the most flack over from readers? It’s amazing how many people believe that interracial marriage is somehow looked down upon by God. At the time, there were two interracial couples living in my ward, and they were great to help me with my research. The only problems they faced in regard to their skin being different colors was from the prejudice of people on the outside. They had beautiful children!


I didn’t dig too deeply into the pornography issue or its effects in this book, mostly because I felt like it was best not to. I covered the essential points and figured if someone was dealing with the problem, they could find the facts and the help they needed. It’s amazing how much more prevalent of a problem it’s become since this book was published.


In writing about suicide, I believed it was one of many issues that people always think shouldn’t be a part of LDS families, but it’s highly prevalent. My research was thorough and I felt like the topic was dealt with effectively, but in the years since I’ve learned (as is probably the case with much of what I write) that I was only scratching the surface. In 2005 my brother took his own life and this topic hit very close to home. I remember thinking that since I had written about it and studied it, I would be able to cope with the grief more easily. I learned that grief is no respecter of persons. I might have understood more what was going on and why, but I still had to walk the path. I wrote about suicide again (ironically I was in the middle of it when my brother’s death occurred) but we’ll get to that in a later entry.


This book was kind of the end of my first era as an LDS author. This sort-of series where all of the characters linked together in one way or another was completed. In order to take it full circle, I brought Michael and Emily in for a cameo appearance. At the time I knew I would be publishing books about Michael’s ancestors (The Gable Faces East, Gables Against the Sky, & The Three Gifts of Christmas) but I didn’t know I was eventually going to go on with the stories of their children. (Gables of Legacy Series) I also didn’t realize I was about to jump off of a cliff in regard to the turn my career was taking. (For more information on that you can go back to the summaries of the books listed in the parentheses above. And it may come up in other book summaries following this.)