This is the (first) sequel to Love Comes Softly, so it was nice to see them so close together. And I was actually interested to see more of Marty and Clark’s story, even though the first movie tied it off pretty nicely.
This is mostly Missy’s story, though – the 9-year-old daughter from the first film. It’s now ten years later, and Missy is a schoolteacher (using those reading skills she learned from Marty in the first film) in the community’s one-room schoolhouse. And she’s played by January Jones, which strikes me now as pretty dumb casting, but I mean, Jones was very young here and didn’t have Mad Men baggage. I swear, she smiles more in ten minutes of this movie than she has in the entire corpus of other work I’ve seen her in. But still, she just seems VERY unlike the Missy of the earlier film – I can’t imagine that spitfire of a 9-year-old growing up into this dismissive and bland young woman.
