Make sure you have a few, uninterrupted hours available when you read Melanie Wells’s My Soul To Keep, because you certainly will not want to put it down.
At 35, Dylan Foster is in the prime of academia but she lives alone, and has very few friends. She’s is a Psych Professor at a Methodist University and her specialty will come in handy as you explore her tale. You will immediately be taken in by her story and the nightmares that surround her. The few close friends she does have are not spared from her perpetual bad luck. She is incredibly real and so is her life. You will relate, even in ways you wish you didn’t. She’s the best friend you just want to wrap your arms around and support. You will meet her deepest enemy, Peter Terry and will find yourself hating him even more than she does.
This book and I were very close companions. Melanie Wells has a way of creating characters who are so real, you grow to care about. She has you in circles sharing Dylan’s despair and elation. The attention she gives spiritual matters and happenings is like that of Frank Peretti. To say I loved it wouldn’t even touch the tip. I absolutely loved this book, beyond normal book-love standards. I want to send a copy to every single woman I am close to.
Reviewed by: Mandy Hutchinson
Posted by admin, in Reviews, Women's Fiction
Curl up on a comfy couch, with a refreshing drink in hand, and be ready to share a few laughs with Erynn Mangum’s MissMatch.
MissMatch is the first of Mangum’s Lauren Holbrook novel series. At 23, loving her job as a photographer and living with her widowed father, Lauren is perfectly content being single. Emboldened with the success of introducing her sister to the man who would become her new husband, Lauren puts her energies into matchmaking her friends. She recruits Hannah, the new receptionist at work to be her accomplice. Lauren’s best friend Brandon and even her single pastor Nick are not safe from Lauren’s schemes. As Lauren manipulates the situations to make her friends fall in love with each other, unexpected complications results. Lauren learns lessons about the sovereignty of God and is challenged to rethink about her own life as a single.
The wit and charm of the characters in MissMatch are endearing and you’ll be drawn you to them. With strong family and spiritual values portrayed appropriately, I would not hesitate recommending it to teenagers. The book is light-hearted and wholesome. With the story moving along quickly, you will be kept glued to its pages. I am looking forward to reading another in the Lauren Holbrook series.
Reviewed by: Katy Lee visit her website Adventures in Parenting.
Posted by admin, in Reviews, Women's Fiction
Mandalay Florentino isn’t your average Hollywood producer. She’s far more delicate than she would like and is often intimated by her new boss, an imposing Swedish woman with a penchant for ruining people’s lives. In Lisa Wingate’s charming Talk of the Town, Mandalay finds herself in tiny Daily, Texas, trying to put together a segment for the singing show sensation American Superstars.
Amber Anderson is the fresh off the farm singer who grew up in Daily. She’s young, idealistic, a tad bit on the naive side and reminiscent of Carrie Underwood. Amber has also been linked up with one of the most notorious womanizers in Hollywood and its Mandalay’s job to keep her out of his clutches. Mandalay’s job is on the line as she tries to keep the segment secret in a town that seems to know more about American Superstars and Amber than she could ever hope to. Throw in a defunct hotel, an older woman who is making life changing personal discoveries and a gorgeous mysterious stranger who sticks out in his Hawaiian shirts and Jeep, and you’ve got yourself the perfect summer’s read.
Be sure to stick this book in your beach bag. It’s light, laugh-out-loud funny in passages and just the right size for a lazy afternoon by the pool. You’ll find yourself ready for the next book in the series.
Reviewed by: Caitlin Muir
Posted by admin, in Reviews, Women's Fiction
It had been years since Sam had been back on the island. If she had had her way, she wouldn’t have ever gone back—there were too many shattered memories of her years in Nantucket. There’s a reason she left without a second backward glance. The pain was too great for her to bear. Surrender Bay follows Sam back to the island where she is forced to face abandoned problems head on—like the man she left behind years before.
Denise Hunter does a good job of drawing the reader into the world of Sam and her young daughter, Caden. Sam’s faults and fears are shown without being judgmental. Her weaknesses are exposed by not exploited. Readers are taken on the rough journey of forgiveness and the discovery of faith. It’s a tangled journey full of memories and hurt feelings but there is always a glimmer of hope waiting to be received.
Surrender Bay is a beautiful allegory of hope and redemption. After finishing the story, readers are given review questions to work through individually, or with a group of friends. This would be an excellent book for a summer book club. It’s not a light and fluffy book but one that you want to pick up and absorb in small pieces.
Reviewed by: Caitlin Muir
Posted by admin, in Reviews, Women's Fiction
Calling all business women! Take your business from flats to stilettos with the bible for business women seeking success in style, entitled The Chic Entrepreneur – Put Your Business in Higher Heels by Elizabeth Gordon. Her trendy theme “Chic Entrepreneur” is sweeping across the states landing in the hands of business women and MEN everywhere. Though her book is geared toward the feminine gender, surprisingly men have been reading the book as well. Their reasoning behind it is due to the fact that it provides them with valuable insight from a different point of view. The men seem to be impressed with the book enough to purchase copies of it for the women in their lives seeking to start (or who have already started) their own business.
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Posted by admin, in General Market, Misc, Reviews
Part history, part armchair travel-guide, and part memoir, A Walk With Jane Austin by Lori Smith put my travel bug in overdrive. Being a big Jane Austen fan, I can easily imagine what it might be like to walk where she once lived. A Walk With Jane Austin gave me a glimpse of the UK from the comfort of my couch.
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Posted by jill, in Non-Fiction, Reviews
Joan. Boring name for a boring life. Or so Joan believes until she meets her new next door neighbor. The handsome doctor her age makes Joan realize that there may be more to life than settling for living at home, getting up every morning to go to an unfulfilling career and wishing she were living one of her sisters’ lives.
But Joan knows she can’t make a change because no one would be there to care for her aging grandmother - a job that she has taken upon herself, but truly enjoys. Not to mention, the doctor may be adorable, but he’s also a Christian. And Joan’s not so sure that’s what she needs right now. Her life is comfortable - why complicate it with thoughts of love and religion. Joan’s not sure her life can handle either.
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Posted by jill, in Chick-lit, Reviews, Virginia Smith
Fires smolder endlessly below the dangerous surface of Guatemala City’s municipal dump. Deadlier fires seethe beneath the tenuous calm of a nation recovering from brutal civil war. Anthropologist Vicki Andrews is researching Guatemala’s “garbage people” when she stumbles across a human body. Curiosity turns to horror as she uncovers no stranger, but an American environmentalist—Vicki’s only sister, Holly.
With authorities dismissing the death as another street crime, Vicki begins tracing Holly’s last steps, a pilgrimage leading from slum squalor to the breathtaking and endangered cloud forests of the Sierra de las Minas Biosphere. But every unraveled thread raises more questions. What betrayal connects Holly’s murder, the recent massacre of a Mayan village, and the long-ago deaths of Vicki’s own parents?
Nor is Vicki the only one demanding answers. Before her search reaches its startling end, the conflagration has spilled across international borders to threaten an American administration and the current war on terror. With no one turning out to be who they’d seemed, who can Vicki trust and who should she fear?
A politically relevant tale of international intrigue and God’s redemptive beauty and hope.
Posted by admin, in Reviews, Women's Fiction
Non-Believers Beware. ADAM may cause your spirit to embrace what your own reasoning rejects. Ted Dekker has a way of enlarging the traditional scope of the common believer. He takes unpopular subjects like demon possession and illustrates each scene with a detailed precision that engages the readers’ senses causing a bone-chilling encounter.
One of the underlying stories of ADAM is the danger of a doctrine or philosophy that rejects supernaturalism and stresses one’s own dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason. Reasoning can be detrimental, allowing the mind, body and soul to be subjective regarding holiness. Though we have all been given the freedom of choice, however, not choosing is still choosing. Dekker reveals hard truths in this novel but the reader will carry the ending results far beyond the moment the last page is read.
ADAM leaves a lingering impression on the psyche that compels the reader to ponder the sincerity of one’s own intentions regarding that of a higher power. When reasoning out weigh faith the results are inevitable. It plays out to be a valuable lesson to one of the characters in this novel, a lesson to die for, or so it goes.
Alex, the main character in ADAM, is bound to his past. A prisoner of his childhood. The pain from yesteryears proves to be more than what Alex can handle. As a result, he conjures up the spirit Eve, a familiar spirit of his past, causing a murderous cycle that Alex won’t soon forget, and neither will the reader.
Reviewed by:
Takiela Bynum
Posted by admin, in Other Fiction Authors, Reviews
Sharon Hinck’s upcoming novel, Symphony of Secrets, takes a turn from any of her other writings. It’s filled with Hinck’s funny, charming writing style, but has a bit of mystery added in.
Symphony of Secrets is set in the Twin Cities of Minnesota (Minneapolis/St. Paul) and features quite a few references to places that locals will recognize. The novel centers around flutist Amy Johnson, a single mother who dreams of playing with the symphony. Currently a music teacher, Amy longs for the stage and yet has chosen the safer, steady income of a teacher.
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Posted by admin, in Mom-lit, Reviews, Sharon Hinck
