ANGELS WATCHING OVER ME

In this first book in the Shenandoah Sisters series, Phillips, a prolific author and longtime CBA bookseller, offers a light historical novel with the flavor of young adult fiction. Mary Ann "Mayme" Jukes is a young African-American slave girl living in Shenandoah County, in North Carolina, in the 1860s. When marauding outlaw Confederate soldiers kill her family, she escapes to Rosewood, another plantation owned by the white family of Kathleen "Katie" Clairborne. Here, Mayme finds more devastation; 15-year-old Katie is the only person left alive. The girls become friends and together vow to run the plantation and keep the adults' deaths a secret until Katie comes of legal age to own the debt-ridden property. The book is mostly a collection of short, sketchy scenes, presumably setting up events for the next book in the series. Phillips's prose is simple and workmanlike, adeptly moving the events along. The reader is left with a few questions (the plantation is devastated, yet the girls have plenty of livestock and groceries), and the spiritual thread is fairly basic (God tells Mayme directly what to do, and they speak to each other in italics). The epilogue leaves the reader hanging until the promised second installment. Young evangelical Christian women looking for escapist historical fiction will find this passable, if not particularly memorable, entertainment. (Jan.)