I finished Sunrise by Karen Kingsbury sometime last week, but hadn’t yet sat down to review it. It wasn’t on my original Spring Reading Thing list, but when I knew it was coming out in early May, I added it, just barely restraining myself so my kids could buy it for me for Mother’s Day. 🙂

The characters in Sunrise, the Baxter family, originated with the Redemption series of five books, then continued primarily focusing on John Baxter’s oldest son, an actor named Dayne, in the next Firstborn series of four books. The Sunrise series will end the Baxter family saga with I believe another four books, the first of which is Sunrise.

Sunrise has an ensemble cast: Dayne and Katy’s story continues, as does John Baxter’s and his daughter Ashley’s. The other Baxters are there in the book, but we see the most of these. Also, the family Katy lives with, the Flanigans, are spotlighted a little more in this book than the previous ones.

There are several issues touched upon: teen-age alcoholism, a friend’s jealousy, the need to be careful in dating — their are three dating or almost, sort of dating couples in the book, and each relationship has its challenges. There’s the issue os what a prime Hollywood actor would have to face if he became a Christian and the issue of dealing with the media. This storyline seemed the most real to me, even though I know no one in Hollywood. I am thinking that Karen must — or else she has a good imagination. 🙂

But one of the things I most enjoyed about the book was the continuation of Dayne and Katy’s story. In so much fiction, when the guy and girl get together and declare their love, that’s pretty much the end of it. But Karen progresses Dayne and Katy’s relationship and shows some of the struggles they will face and concessions and sacrifices they will have to make, especially when joining together from such different worlds.

Overall this was one of my favorite Karen Kingsbury books.

(By the way, many Spring Reading Thing participants are linking to reviews of the books they’ve read on Katrina’s blog here, if you’d like to see what other people think about other books. Plus Semicolon sponsors a weekly book review link on Saturdays.)