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
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
Elizabeth Landis is Aware. Well, that is what she will tell you. She has people figured out. Either a person is Aware or they are Unaware. This is what she has firmly believed her whole life…until one day when God intervenes. In a single moment Elizabeth’s life is shaken to the core, changed forever. Clinging to her new found faith, Elizabeth reviews her life, an ill-kept garden in her hands. Hoping to discover the root of what caused her husband to seek the love of another woman, she examines her “garden”, weeds and all. Could she have foreseen and somehow avoided what had happened? What led to this betrayal? Is God’s grace sufficient to mend this broken relationship?
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Posted by admin, in Jamie Langston Turner, Women's Fiction
In Bygones, Kim Vogel Sawyer has weaved a tale of a young woman returning to the roots of the Mennonite faith. Marie Koeppler left her Mennonite community when she was a young girl and in love. The death of a beloved aunt and the strange conditions of her will bring Marie, now a widow, and her daughter back to Sommerfield 23 years later. The Mennonite community is wary of Marie’s intentions and a spree of mysterious thefts point suspicion towards Marie and her daughter. Although Marie’s heart yearns for the faith of her youth, will the church and her family welcome Marie back into their community? And will Henry Braun, the man who once courted Marie, welcome her back into his heart?
Bygones is a well written book that will draw you into the community and leave you waiting eagerly for the next book in the series.
Review by:
Angela Meyer
Posted by admin, in Kim Vogel Sawyer, Women's Fiction
Set in Colorado during the late 1800’s, Daughter of Joy, the first book in the Brides of Culdee Creek series, tells the story of Abigail Stanton. A widow and bereaved mother Abigail takes a position as housekeeper for Conor MacKay.
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Posted by admin, in Kathleen Morgan, Reviews, Women's Fiction
A worn family Bible. A packet of ribbon tied letters. A faded family photograph. These are the things that hold each of the scattered Gallagher siblings together. Orphaned by a fire, the three siblings are brought to Missouri to be adopted by separate families. Kim Vogel Sawyer masterfully weaves together the stories of the siblings in My Heart Remembers.
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Posted by admin, in Kim Vogel Sawyer, Reviews, Women's Fiction
