Shadow of the Storm

Shadow of the Storm is a 2016 historical novel by Connilyn Cossette.

Shira came out of Egypt with the other Hebrews and is living at the foot of Mount Sinai, in sight of the cloud that the book treats as the divine presence among the people. When they turn to a golden idol and the camp falls into disorder, she uses the confusion to begin learning midwifery, work she takes to far more easily than the weaving her mother intends for her, and she defies her mother to take it up. The crisis in the camp is the golden idol and the disorder that follows it, and Shira uses that confusion as the opening she needs.

A birth that goes wrong changes the direction of her life. She is left bound to a man who once betrayed her, responsible for three young children, and exposed to a woman who wants revenge for a death attributed to the Levites. Cossette writes fiction set in the biblical world for a Christian readership, and this novel works the romance through obligation and danger rather than through courtship, with the quarrels between the tribes supplying the wider conflict. Quarrels between the Hebrew tribes and the foreigners living among them keep the camp dangerous, and Shira's new work takes her into households on both sides of that division.