In Lost Melody by Lori Copeland and Virginia Smith, Jill King is a talented concert pianist on her way to Carnegie Hall when she’s involved in a horrible subway accident which kills most of the passengers. Jill survives, but sustains an injury to her hip, and what’s worse, to her hand, tragically ending any dreams she had for her future as a pianist.

In the year following she slowly recovers physically as much as possible, but she is still seeing a counselor to deal with the emotional trauma. People feel it’s time for her to move on, and things begin to move toward a permanent commitment to her boyfriend Greg, a lawyer with promising political ambitions.

About this time she begins having recurring terrifying dreams, and she feels they are portending a disaster to her oceanside Novia Scotia town and she’s supposed to warn people. But warning people carries the risk of being thought crazy, which would not only damage her reputation but would also affect her fiance’s career.

I’d seen this pop up on other blogs and always thought it sounded interesting until I got to the part about the dreams, then I’d close the screen and move on to something else. But when I was looking for a new audiobook, somehow I missed that part when I ordered.

For me, I can’t help reading/listening and wondering “Where are the authors going with this? Are they trying to promote a view that God speaks to people in this way today?”

Personally, I don’t believe that He does. No, there is no Bible verse where God says, “I will never again speak audibly or through dreams to anyone ever again until they get to heaven.” But my understanding of I Corinthians 13:8b-10 (“But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.”) is that once the Word of God came, the need for the “sign gifts” faded away. I know there are differences of opinion about that, and that’s fine: I don’t mean to start a debate. I’m just relaying my mindset as I listened to the book. The most realistic and seemingly genuine incidents I’ve heard of their use today have occurred among primitive people who don’t have the Scriptures in their languages yet. Plus, I don’t know of a Biblical prophecy that’s just about getting out of town because of a coming disaster: usual it has to do with a call to repentance. There are multitudes of crashes, floods, explosions, earthquakes, and other disasters throughout the world on a daily basis: why would God pick one little town and send a prophecy to them to leave town because something bad is about to happen?

But I decided if I was going to get anything out of the book, I needed to just set that aside mentally, accept it as just a fictional part of a fictional story rather than reality, and just see how it played out.

I felt the authors did handle well the ramifications of such a character with such a message: the disbelief of some, including her fiance, and his wrestling with how to support her while not letting her stance have a negative impact on his career; the support of others, with a tiny few carrying it over into a bit of extreme fanaticism; the media interest and “spin” on it, etc. All of that was very realistic and did make me empathize with the prophets of old, the reluctance some of them may have felt at proclaiming a message that many would not receive. The authors also did a great job with the plot development and the build-up of suspense to the climax at the end.

I enjoyed most the parts about Jill’s recovery and the issues she faced in connection with the loss of her dream. But even regarding the prophecy as fictional, as a plot element, I didn’t really enjoy that part of the book as well.

In the small town of Cold Sassy, GA, in the early 1900s, Rucker Blakeslee shocked and scandalized the town and his family by remarrying Miss Love Simpson just three weeks after his wife died. That was the worst of it, but added to the scandal were the facts that she was “nearly a Yankee” and half his age. Thereafter she was the main subject of gossip (as if the marriage was totally her fault) and could seem to do nothing right in their eyes. That’s the basic plot of Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns, but the story is told through the eyes of Rucker’s grandson, Will Tweedy, who is sympathetic with the couple, and whose teen-age perspective causes him to question things and not necessarily go along with the status quo.

I do generally like small-town Southern fiction, but it took me a long while to get into this one. I almost laid it aside many time but persevered because so many people told me they had liked it.  A lot of the town gossip, prejudices, and family competition seemed mean-spirited; Will had a minor obsession with ladies’ bosoms (trying to catch a peek when his sister-in-law nursed her baby, noticing how Miss Love jiggled when she played the piano), there is a smattering of bad language and some faulty theology (I do understand this is not at all meant to be a Christian book, but if a writer is going to get into theology, then, yes, I am going to evaluate that). One example: when Will asks why we don’t get what we ask for in prayer even though Jesus said “Ask and ye shall receive,” his Grandpa says: “Maybe Jesus was talkin’ in His sleep, son, or folks heard Him wrong. Or maybe them disciples tryin’ to start a church thought everybody would join up if’n they said Jesus Christ would give the Garden a-Eden to anybody believed He was the son a-God and like thet” (p. 98). He does decide to “study on this some more” and later decides that Jesus may not give exactly what you ask (healing, a new job, etc.), but He will give you the grace to deal with whatever He allows, which is closer to the truth. But perhaps Rucker’s theological convolutions were meant as just another window into a personality that wants its own way and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, which is manifested in various ways throughout the book.

I did enjoy Will’s camping trip. I loved the way Will’s innocent but unwise foray into impending doom on the train tracks was told. By the end of the book I grew to like the relationship Will had with his grandfather and the growing relationship between Rucker and Love from a marriage of convenience to a true, deep love. I liked that everything came more or less right in the end though I was sorry for the tragedy that led to it.

One of my favorite lines was when Will was pondering being in mourning (wearing a black armband, not being able to do anything fun) over the death of his grandmother as opposed to what it meant to actually mourn for her: “But to mourn, that’s different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person” (p. 56). If you’ve ever mourned anyone you loved, I’m sure you can sympathize with that feeling.

My other favorite line was more humorous. When Miss Love models some driving attire in the store window because Rucker won’t buy a mannequin, Will’s Aunt “Loma was jealous. The store window being like a little stage and her having taken elocution, she considered herself the only person in Cold Sassy qualified to act like a dummy” (p. 282).

I went online looking for some more insight into the book, and these SparkNotes helped (warning: they do contain spoilers to the plot since they’re discussing it more in depth). It is a mark of good writing that I’m still thinking about the book days later and discovering angles, connections, and layers that I’d missed at first, but it still won’t go down as one of my favorites.

I finished a couple of books that I just wanted to mention briefly rather than writing a full review.

 Coming Home is Karen Kingsbury’s latest and supposedly last book about the Baxter family. Though the family is the subject of some 22 previous books, I don’t think one would need to read all of them before enjoying this book.

The extended Baxter family is coming home for a surprise party for patriarch John Baxter’s 70th birthday. As each of his children reflect on their lives in order to write him a letter about what he means to them, their stories are summed up for the reader. But a tragedy turns their world upside down and shakes and tests their faith.

I can’t say much more than that without revealing too much. I enjoyed the book very much.

 Walking on Broken Glass by Christa Allan is the story of Leah Thornton, who at 27 confronts the truth of her alcoholism and checks herself into rehab. She comes to realize that there are more problems with her life than just alcohol, and that everything she blames her husband for may not be entirely his fault.

I loved Christa’s witty writing and Leah’s self-discovery, but I thought her admission of her alcoholism came a little too easily. I’ve mentioned before that my father was an alcoholic for most of his adult life, losing his family and his health, I don’t think he ever did admit that he had a problem, at least not that I ever heard. But I suppose it is possible to admit such after one confrontation.

There is also much more about Leah and her husband’s sexual life than I like to read. It is integral to the story and and for the most part it is no more explicit than what you’d find in Song of Solomon or Proverbs 5:19. Still, I’d rather the issues between them were expressed through some other venue.

I also felt the ending was left hanging unresolved. I do appreciate that not every thread of a story needs to be wrapped up in a neat bow at the end, but this ending was so abrupt that at first I thought perhaps not all of it came through on my Kindle download.

I did, however, really enjoy Christa’s writing and will look for more of her books in the future.