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Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
Joseph G. Asher’s Second Chances: Duty starts in 1856. The story follows John Holman and his sister Sarah after the steamboat Twilight explodes on the Ohio River, killing their father and destroying the family’s fortune. Their mother, Constance, keeps the family in Louisville while taking on work at the Galt House, but a violent dockworker named Matthias Pitt suggests the disaster may not have been accidental. When Pitt threatens the family, Constance sends Sarah to Cincinnati to pursue medical training at Cincinnati College of Medicine and Surgery. At the same time, John leaves for river work under Captain Merriweather Jones on the Hannibal Morris. As Sarah enters a world where women must fight for medical education and John learns steamboat duty, faith becomes the anchor they carry into danger in the years before the Civil War.
Joseph G. Asher’s Second Chances: Duty shows the spirit of Christian historical fiction with devout faith in service. Asher gives the Ohio River world a sense of life through John’s apprenticeship, where Jonesy explains how shaving the shoreline keeps a steamboat beyond the Ohio’s hard current. That detail gives pilot training a reality that puts the reader beside the wheel. Sarah receives thoughtful treatment through her Cincinnati education under Dr. Hill. Her watchfulness for infection gives her medical work purpose. The Christian element speaks through conduct. On the Hills’ porch, John joins Sarah in prayer over Proverbs 3 before their separation, giving duty the sound of devotion spoken within a family. Asher presents faith as something practiced each day. I recommend this novel to readers who appreciate Christian historical fiction shaped by a life of service under prayerful moral conviction.
