Friday’s Fave Five

Posted on January 13, 2017 by Barbara Harper

It’s Friday, time to look back over the blessings of the week with Susanne at Living to Tell the Story and other friends.

This has been….not the best week I’ve had in a long time. I caught my husband’s cold last weekend, started feeling better Tuesday, then felt worse on Wednesday. I hadn’t had one in a while and had forgotten just how much they can take out of you. But sometimes when the week isn’t all sunshine and roses, it’s even more important to stop and look for the blessings in it. Here are a few from last week:

1. Restoring order. I always have mixed emotions about putting the Christmas decorations away. I hate to see them go, especially the lights, but do like getting everything back in order again. I’m thankful my husband and youngest son help with this – otherwise it would take me days rather than taking us together a morning. Then I’ve been able to declutter a bit here and there the piles that accumulate when life is busy and some paperwork from last year.

2. Snow day! We got maybe an inch or two last Friday, which for us Southerners is a really big deal. 🙂 Thankfully the roads weren’t too bad at all this time. Jason and his family came over on Saturday so Timothy could sled down a little hill in the back. There was such a difference from last year – when he was frowning and not quite sure what to make of it, to this year, when he loved it.

timothy-in-snow

Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of him smiling and laughing on the sled – those are all on video, and I can’t upload personal videos here without paying extra for the privilege. But it was a fun day. 🙂

3. The bath aide came in the snow. That might sound like an odd one, but in the past, if we’ve had any kind of snow or ice on the ground, no one from hospice comes out, though I guess they would in an emergency. I can’t blame them – those of us who aren’t used to driving in the snow get kind of anxious about it, plus our roads aren’t treated as much as they are up North where snow is a regular occurrence. On my mother-in-law’s usual bath day, I was thinking I would probably have to do it, which I wasn’t looking forward to with both a broken toe and a cold. But we’ve had a different aide for the last several weeks, and she did come, just a little later than usual.

4. Brownie mixes when you want something sweet but not terribly involved.

5. A slight schedule change for my mother-in-law’s afternoon routine has made a big difference for the better in how I can arrange my time and tasks.

Bonus: Cough drops and tissues with lotion in them. 🙂 And I’m thankful that my m-i-l hasn’t caught anything from either of us.

I think we’ve turned a corner with our colds, so I’m looking forward to a more productive week ahead. Hope you have a good one, too.

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Book Review: The Golden Braid

Posted on January 11, 2017 by Barbara Harper

Melanie Dickerson’s Hagenheim/ Fairy Tale Romance Series retells familiar old stories and sets them in medieval Germany and England with no magic or fairy godmothers coming to the rescue. The sixth book in the series is The Golden Braid, based on Rapunzel.

Rapunzel’s mother has her locked up, not in a stone tower (at least at first), but in a prison of fear. She’s told Rapunzel all her life that other people are not to be trusted, men especially, and to keep to herself. They move frequently, which, combined with her mother’s warnings, makes it hard for Rapunzel to ever make any connections or feel like she belongs anywhere. At 17 she’s beginning to wonder if her life is normal.

Her mother is a midwife who found Rapunzel when she was 3 and has raised her ever since. Rapunzel has no memory of her life before and feels abandoned by her family.

As the two are traveling to a new location one day, they’re attacked by robbers. One of Duke Wilheim’s knights, Sir Gerek, happens to be nearby and comes to their rescue. But instead of being grateful, Rapunzel’s mother, Gothel, wants to be rid of him as soon as possible and Rapunzel is distant. He insists on accompanying them to Hagenheim, however, for their protection.

Meanwhile the robber turns the tables and comes after Gerek, and Rapunzel comes to his aid. Years ago she had some boys teach her how to throw knives, and she disables the attacker. But Gerek’s horse has thrown and and landed on top of him, breaking his arm and leg. Rapunzel feels compelled to help him, so they care for him until they come to a monastery where they leave Gerek to recover while they travel on to Hagenheim.

Rapunzel has always wanted to learn how to read, and sneaks away back to the monastery to ask if they will teach her in exchange for her working there cleaning. They agree and assign Gerek the task – since he’s not doing anything but recovering anyway. Neither of them is pleased with the arrangement, but they carry on anyway. Rapunzel finds Gerek haughty and grouchy. He thinks she’s pretty, but would never marry a peasant: he wants to marry a wealthy widow with land since he has none of his own.

Eventually life with Gothel becomes so precarious that Rapunzel wonders about her mother’s sanity, and she runs away to the castle in Hagenheim. With Gerek’s references, she is able to work as a maid. As she gets to know him in a different setting, she finds much to admire, but knows he would never consider her. But she when uncovers the mystery to her own identity, she struggles with the best way to handle it. And with the castle coming under attack by an enemy, that will have to wait anyway.

The action in the book, especially after Rapunzel comes to the castle, overlaps with that in the previous book, The Princess Spy, but I don’t think you’d have to have read that book to enjoy this one. I like how each book in the series can be read alone yet connects with the others and how characters we’ve met before show up again. I was delighted by who Rapunzel’s parents turned out to be.

I love a Christian fiction book that’s not ashamed to be Christian. Melanie weaves the faith element in quite naturally.

This series is listed a Young Adult, but to me they don’t read that way (except perhaps for The Princess Spy). It got a little too romance-y for me in places (shivers running up their spines when they accidentally brushed against each other’s fingers while handing something to the other and that kind of thing). But otherwise I enjoyed it very much, not just for the story, but also for the spiritual steps each character needed to take.

Others in the series, linked to my reviews:

Book 1: The Healer’s Apprentice based on Sleeping Beauty
Book 2: The Merchant’s Daughter, based on Beauty and the Beast
Book 3: The Fairest Beauty, based on Snow White
Book 4: The Captive Maiden, based on Cinderella
Book 5: The Princess Spy, based on The Frog Prince

This book and The Merchant’s Daughter have been my favorites. I’m reading the seventh, The Silent Songbird based on The Little Mermaid, now.

If you like fairy tale retellings, medieval stories, or clean romances, you will probably like The Golden Braid.

Genre: Christian fiction fairy tale
Objectionable elements: None
My rating: 9 out of 10

(Sharing with Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books and Carole’s Books You Loved)

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Book Review: A Fall of Marigolds

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Barbara Harper

In A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner, Clara Woods is a nurse on Ellis Island in September of 1911. She describes it as something of an in-between place. Immigrants who come in are kept on the island for a time if they have been exposed to any kind of contagious disease. Clara is in her own in-between place as well. Some months earlier she had worked in Manhattan and encountered a man named Edward every day on the elevator. Their relationship had never progressed beyond mutual attraction, but she felt certain they were going to know each other better. But she lost him in the Triangle Factory Shirtwaist Fire. She moved to Ellis Island to work and hasn’t set foot in Manhattan since. She does her work well and is friends with her roommate, but never goes out, never pursues other friendships, has no future plans.

One day she notices one of the incoming immigrants has a colorful scarf, a woman’s scarf, around his neck. She learns that he lost his wife to scarlet fever on the voyage to America. Since he has been exposed, he is detained, and he indeed comes down with the fever. Clara is drawn to him in their mutual grief, and in trying to help him, gets herself embroiled in a dilemma that causes a crisis of conscious.

In September 2001, that same marigold scarf is brought into the heirloom fabric shop where Taryn Michaels works. It has been passed down through the customer’s family, and she and her sister both like it and wanted to see if the print could be found to make another one. Taryn is delayed in meeting her husband by the customer, but that ends up saving her life, as the 9/11 attacks occur while she is on her way. Unfortunately, her husband was in the Towers and could not escape. So for ten years she has been in her own in-between place, until the tenth anniversary of 9/11 causes a resurgence of photos from the event, one of which shows her with the scarf, the beginning of a chain of events

The author goes back and forth between the two women’s timelines to unfold their stories, their similarities, the history of the scarf, and how the women get out of their in-between places.

I loved the historical aspect of this book. I hadn’t known much about Ellis Island and nothing about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Taryn’s experiences on the streets of NYC just after the 9/11 attacks were gripping.

The two women’s journeys toward moving on were compelling and empathetic as well, except it was a little hard to account for the depth of Clara’s grief given that she had known Edward for only two weeks and only on the surface at that. Of course, she was dealing with not just the loss of the relationship, but the potential as well. There is an interview with the author at the end of the book in which she says, “I really do believe that the capacity to love is what gives meaning to our lives, even though we are never more vulnerable than when we let down our guard and trust our hearts to others. The world isn’t perfect; nor are other people. It’s quite possible that loving flawed people in an equally flawed world is going to subject you to the worst kind of heartache. But I like to think that the heart is capable of surviving the costs of loving because it was meant to. The heart is made of muscle; we are meant to exercise it. This is what Taryn and Clara come to realize. It seems to me the best kind of takeaway I could hope for.”

A few of my favorite quotes:

The person who completes your life is not so much the person who shares all the years of your existence, but rather the person who made your life worth living, no matter how long or short a time you were given to spend with them.

It should always make us happy to say that loving someone and being loved by someone is worth whatever price paid.

Everything beautiful has a story it wants to tell. But not every story is beautiful.

If the book was meant to be Christian fiction, I found it a little lacking in that department: I didn’t find much distinctly Christian about it except that the characters wonder sometimes whether God is at work behind their circumstances. But if it was meant as a clean, historical, inspirational novel, then it was very good.

Genre: Historical inspirational fiction
Objectionable elements: A couple of “damns”; God’s name used carelessly a few times.
My rating: 8 out of 10

(Sharing with Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books and Carole’s Books You Loved)

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Loving as Jesus loved

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Barbara Harper

Some years ago I read in a missionary biography about a woman who struggled for years to truly love the people she came to minister to. Finally she stopped looking at herself, her failures, her lack, and began thinking of God’s love for her. And almost unconsciously on her part, God changed her heart, to the point that people commented to her husband on the change.

I thought I knew which writer shared that, but I’ve looked through her books and haven’t found that passage. Yet that lesson has come back to me many times over. I feel the same lack, and pray often for repentance, forgiveness, and change.

How does the Bible tell us spiritual change comes? II Corinthians 3:18: But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

Jesus said, in John 13:34, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” He had said it before in John 15:12, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you,” just after the section about about in Him. Ephesians 5:1-2 say: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

So how did Jesus love? This is a topic worthy of much more study, but after just a brief time of thought, I have plenty to meditate on:

Jesus us loved us “while we were yet sinners” Romans 5:8. He didn’t wait for us to clean up our act before He extended love to us.

He loved us before we loved Him: “We love because he first loved us” 1 John 4:19. He took the initiative.

He gave Himself.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, ⁴who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father. Galatians 1:3-4.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20.

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Ephesians 5:1-2.

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. 1 Timothy 2:5-6.

Who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. Titus 2:14.

That giving involved inconvenience, weariness, misunderstandings, false rumors, humiliation, pain, and death.

He ministered to others when He was the only One who deserved to be ministered to.

He laid down His life for us. “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” 1 John 3:16. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” John 15:13.

He loved not only in word but in deed.

Early in my Christian life, I had trouble forgiving others because I’d get stuck going over and over what they did to me, how wrong it was, and how they didn’t deserve forgiveness. And then I encountered the parable of a man who was forgiven a devastating amount that would have been the absolute ruin of him, yet wouldn’t forgive his fellow man a very small amount. That made clear to me like nothing else that forgiveness wasn’t based on how small or large the wrong or how “deserving” the wrongdoer was. It was based on God’s forgiveness of me. I had wronged Him so much more than anything anyone else has done to me, yet He fully forgave. In light of that, how can I withhold forgiveness from anyone else?

Similarly, my love for others is not based on whether they deserve it and doesn’t come from my paltry efforts. Oswald Chambers said in the My Utmost for His Highest reading for April 30, “The springs of love are in God, not in us. It is absurd to look for the love of God in our hearts naturally; it is only there when it has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.” When the Holy Spirit sheds abroad His love in my heart, when I abide in Him, when I behold His great love for me, then His love will fill and overflow from me to others.

(Sharing with Inspire Me Mondays, Testimony Tuesday, Wise Woman, Tell His Story, Woman to Woman Word-Filled Wednesday, Thought-provoking Thursday)

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Not What My Hands Have Done

Posted on January 8, 2017 by Barbara Harper

Not what my hands have done can save my guilty soul;
Not what my toiling flesh has borne can make my spirit whole.
Not what I feel or do can give me peace with God;
Not all my prayers and sighs and tears can bear my awful load.

Your voice alone, O Lord, can speak to me of grace;
Your power alone, O Son of God, can all my sin erase.
No other work but Yours, no other blood will do;
No strength but that which is divine can bear me safely through.

Thy work alone, O Christ, can ease this weight of sin;
Thy blood alone, O Lamb of God, can give me peace within.
Thy love to me, O God, not mine, O Lord, to Thee,
Can rid me of this dark unrest, And set my spirit free.

I bless the Christ of God; I rest on love divine;
And with unfaltering lip and heart I call this Savior mine.
His cross dispels each doubt; I bury in His tomb
Each thought of unbelief and fear, each lingering shade of gloom.

I praise the God of grace; I trust His truth and might;
He calls me His, I call Him mine, My God, my joy and light.
’Tis He Who saveth me, and freely pardon gives;
I love because He loveth me, I live because He lives.

~ Horatius Bonar

Laudable Linkage

Posted on January 7, 2017 by Barbara Harper

It’s been quite a while since I have been able to share with you some interesting reading I’ve found online the past few weeks. So here goes:

What Grieving People Wish You Knew at Christmas. “For those who’ve recently lost someone they love, the holidays can seem more like something to survive than to enjoy.” That’s true for other holidays and occasions besides Christmas and for other losses or hard times as well.

We Need to Talk About Church Scheduling.

How Not to Parent a Strong-willed Child.

Honoring the Dishonorable. How do we honor parents when they act in ways undeserving of it?

Taking Back Christianese” “America Is a Christian Nation”

Dear Women’s Ministry: Stop Telling Me I’m Beautiful. “The question is not whether or not these things are true, but whether or not this is the most important message women need to hear.”

This is the time of year a lot of people rededicate themselves to reading their Bibles, so there have been a lot of articles touching on that:

One Reason to Dedicate Yourself to Bible Reading in 2017.

4 Reasons to Have a Quiet Time.

5 Ways Daily Bible Reading Impacts Your Life.

3 Fresh Ideas for Improving Your Bible Reading in 2017. Love the opening sentences here: “I am still blown away by the idea that the God of the universe wants to communicate with us on a daily basis and that he has chose to do so in this miraculous book we call the Bible. Historically—both the history it contains and the history of its shaping and transmission in the community of faith—it is astounding. Literarily it is magnificently crafted. Narratively it is riveting, and poetically it is breath-taking. Theologically it is deeply grounding, and practically it is life-altering.”

3 Tips For Reading the OT like a Christian. Helpful for times like when you get bogged down in Leviticus.

A 5-Day Bible Reading Plan. Nice because it gives you some leeway for those times when the unexpected comes up.

And, finally, I could have used this tip when singing soprano in the choir. 🙂 I like how they keep a straight face through it all:

Happy first Saturday of 2017!

Friday’s Fave Five

Posted on January 6, 2017 by Barbara Harper

It’s Friday, time to look back over the blessings of the week with Susanne at Living to Tell the Story and other friends.

It’s the first FFF of the New Year! And a great way to start off. Here are a few highlights from the last week:

1. The last weekend of vacation. My oldest son was here through the weekend, and everyone else was off, so we had some great family times together. In addition to some of the activities listed below, we went to an Indian restaurant and my oldest son made Chocolate Pretzel Pie. Normally I am not a big pretzel fan, but this had the right combination of saltiness and crunchiness without tasting too pretzely. He had tried it for a gathering of his friends around Thanksgiving that they cal Piesgiving, where everyone brings some kind of food in a pie, and it was a hit there, so he made it again for us.

Timothy likes to help in the kitchen. 🙂

Normally he makes duck soup, but this time he tried duck shakes. 🙂

We’ve had that child’s Tupperware set since our boys were little, and it’s one of the things we kept for when other children came over. I love that our grandchild can use it now.

2. Playing games is one of my favorite things to do when we are all together. We generally play at least one round of Settlers of Catan, and this was the closest I ever remember it being: three of us were within one point of winning and had in hand what we needed to win on our next turn. We also like to play Telestrations. Then we played some Jackbox games through the TV connected to my son’s Steam account ( a game-playing site, though these games are also available for the Apple TV, Firestick, Xbox, and other venues). They had a family-friendly venue (I think for some of the games you have to set it for that option). We played Drawful, Fibbage, and one other that involved sound effects. People play by logging into the Jackbox TV site on their phones, and people play on their phones, but the game play shows up on the TV. I don’t know if this is making sense – but it was a lot of fun!

3. An outing in Gatlinburg. My husband at one time had gotten tickets for three of the Ripley’s attractions in Gatlinburg, and we used one of them last summer to attend the aquarium. We wanted to try to use the second one this break, so we went to the Ripley’s Mirror Maze. I thought the maze itself would be challenging enough, but the darkness and changing lights made it more so. Normally changing lights is not my thing. But this was a lot of fun to do as a family and not too hard to get through. Timothy wasn’t frightened by it – he just stood stock still when we first went in, trying to figure out what was going on. 🙂 It’s pretty short, so we wouldn’t normally go to Gatlinburg just for that, but I’m still trying not to do too much while my broken toe heals. That and going out to eat was just the right length of an outing for this time. We discovered a new-to-us Mexican food restaurant that was great in every way -good food, quick service, knowledgeable waiter, and a good gluten-free menu for my daughter-in-law (No Way Jose’s Cantina near the aquarium).

4. New calendars. I love getting out new calendars for the year, filling in everyone’s birthdays and anniversaries, and looking at all those clean, fresh pages!

5. Gift cards. I was considering whether I wanted to invest in a certain purchase this morning, and remembered I had a gift card to a place where I could order it online. That made the decision very easy! 🙂

Hope your new year has gotten off to a great start!

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Misadventures in the new car

Posted on January 5, 2017 by Barbara Harper

I mentioned on a recent Friday’s Fave Five that we got a new car at the end of the year. We were going to need to replace our van some time in the near future, and my husband went down to the dealership we were considering to see if they had any end-of-the-year sales that would make it worthwhile to go ahead and get a car. They did, and the salesman was eager enough to sell that my husband got pretty much everything he wanted. Plus, since we didn’t absolutely have to get a car right now, when the negotiations weren’t going the way my husband wanted, he could honestly and without remorse and coercion walk away. That, we discovered, was a good position to negotiate from. I’m glad he likes doing that kind of thing. I hate it – I want to know the sale price and any discounts available and be done with it. But because he likes that kind of interaction, we’ve gotten some great deals along the way.

I don’t remember how old our old van is – maybe 18 or so years? Old enough that it has a cassette tape player, and when it came out, keyless entry was the newest, coolest feature. The new one, of course, has all kinds of bells and whistles I need to get used to. Jim took me out to the car after he brought it home and showed where various things were. He set up what was needed for my phone to connect via bluetooth and play through the speakers (Yay!!) and showed me how to activate that and various other things.

I had driven the car briefly when he brought it home for a test drive, but I wanted my first solo voyage to be a very small and short excursion while I got used to it. I had to go to the post office yesterday, which provided a perfect opportunity.

The car starts with a push button, but requires that you have a “key” that connects wirelessly so that not just anyone can come start and drive your car. So I got in, got set, pushed the button — and everything came on except the engine. The windshield wipers were going full blast because it had been raining the last time we were out. I knew where the controls for it were, so I was turning everything on them that I could, but nothing was happening. I finally realized I had been fiddling with the controls for the back windshield wipers. But I couldn’t see what to do to turn off the front wipers. I accidentally moved the lever, and saw out of the corner of my eye something on the screen behind the steering wheel that said “Off, Int, Lo, Hi.” The setting moved when I moved the lever, so, voila, that’s how to turn the windshield wipers off. That sure seemed more complicated than it needed to be.

But I still had the problem of how to turn on the engine. I pushed the button again — nothing. I called my husband, but my call just went to voicemail. I got the manual out of the glove compartment, and you’d think “How to start your car” would be on the first page. But, no, I had to go searching for it and found it about halfway in. Turns out I have to have my foot on the brake pedal and then push the button, even though the car is in “park.” Success!

The car has a nifty back-up setting where it shows you what’s behind you and has little red and yellow lines to show you which way you need to go to back up. I had been looking forward to that feature, but I found it disorienting – when I turned the way I thought it was indicating, I went the opposite way. So I had to just ignore it and back out the old way, looking over my shoulder.

This car has many more warning beeps than I am used to – one for when you veer out of your line, proximity sensors on all sides so you know when you get to close to something, etc.

The actual driving was fine – except I kept stopping too suddenly. Have to get used to the feel of the new brakes.

I kept thinking this all probably looked like a scene in a sitcom. 🙂

I was glad my first excursion was a short one, because I was pretty rattled when I got home. 🙂

Earlier, when we were in the car together and my husband was driving, I got out the manual to flip through it, and was overwhelmed with too much information. What I probably need to do is just go sit with it in the garage and go through the manual page by page.

My kids love the learning curve with new technology. Me — not so much. I’m sure I’ll love everything once I get more familiar with it. But I hope my next drive goes more smoothy than the first.

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Book Review: A Patchwork Christmas Collection

Posted on January 4, 2017 by Barbara Harper

When I saw A Patchwork Christmas Collection by Judith Miller, Nancy Moser, and Stephanie Grace Whitson mentioned at Monica‘s, I thought I might like it as a Christmas read, partly because I had read and enjoyed the first two authors before.

The book is made up up three different stories:

“Seams Like Love” by Judith Miller.Karla Stuke lives in the Amana colonies in Iowa with her family in the 1890s. She was engaged, but her fiance jilted her for another. Feeling she can never trust her heart to any man again, she puts all thoughts of love and marriage away and helps her family provide communal meals in the hotel. Then suddenly her old childhood friend, Frank, returns. He has trained as a pharmacist’s apprentice and been assigned to her village. He hopes to renew their friendship, but finds her distant. When he learns that she is no longer engaged, he wonders if he can ever convince her that all men are not as faithless as the one who hurt her.

I had never heard of the Amana colonies before and found a bit of their history here. The Inspirationists began in Germany, migrated to New York, and eventually established a communal colony of six villages in Iowa. From what this page says of their beliefs, they sound somewhat similar to Quakers, and the returning pharmacist in the book mentioned he was often mistaken for Amish. The “brethren,” or leaders, directed much, choosing who was going to live where and what their vocation or contribution to the community should be.I thought in the book they seemed awfully blunt with each other: I am not sure if that was characteristic of them or the author’s interpretation.

But I enjoyed the story, earning about this group, Karla and Frank’s journey, and especially Karla’s needing to overcome a perception of herself unwittingly planted by her sister years before.

“A Patchwork Love” by Stephanie Grace Whitson. In Nebraska in 1875, Jane McClure finds herself in dire straits when she is not only widowed, but near penniless due to her late husband’s bad investments. A man she met once in another town, Mr. Huggins, has tentatively offered to pursue the possibility of marriage, not as a love match, but to help each other. He provides for Jane and her daughter to come by train to spend Christmas with him to get to know one another better. But on the way the train is stopped by a severe snowstorm and drifts. A man and his mother living nearby come to the train to offer food to the workers and shelter for Jane and her daughter until the train gets moving again. Jane’s daughter has become very sick, so everyone focuses at first on tending to her. But in the process Jane notices that the man, Peter Gruber, whose soul is as wounded as his damaged face, also has a tender heart and ways. As circumstances keep coming up to prevent them from leaving, Jane worries that her one opportunity to save her family with Mr. Huggins is slipping away. But will she recognize the opportunity right before her?

“The Bridal Quilt” by Nancy Moser. New York society couple Ada Wallace and Samuel Alcott are on the verge on engagement: in fact, everyone expects that to happen at Christmas. But one evening when Samuel goes “slumming” in a poor side of town with friends at their insistence, he rescues a young girl from being beaten in the street. When he takes her back to the foundling home where she stays, he is struck with the need of the children, and his life and outlook are forever changed. He tries to reconcile what he feels he is called to do with his life with Ada, and they don’t seem to fit together, bringing him to the point of a major decision that will affect them all.

I enjoyed all the stories, but especially the last one. Each occurs during the Christmas season and involves a quilt and a “second chance at love.” Each chapter ends with discussion questions, a crochet or quilting project, and a recipe.

I had wanted to finish it before the end of the year, but, life being what it is, that did not happen. But I didn’t mind extending the season a bit with this nice, cozy Christmas read.

Genre: Christmas inspirational fiction
Objectionable elements: None.
My rating: 9 out of 10

(Sharing with Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books)

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Reading Plans for 2017

Posted on January 3, 2017 by Barbara Harper

We no sooner post our favorite books or reading challenge wrap-ups from last year, and it is time to plan new ones for the new year. Such is the life of a book lover. 🙂

I like reading challenges for spurring me on to read things I might not or to be a little more intentional in my reading, but I’ve found I have to have some breathing space in my reading plans to pick up something else along the way if I feel so led. Too many reading plans or challenges leave me feeling constricted and constrained. The two that seemed to work best for me last year were the Back to the Classics Challenge and the Mount TBR (To Be Read) Challenge. Sometimes there are one or two more small ones through the year, but these are the major ones for me.

First, though, I’ll be hosting the Laura Ingalls Wilder reading challenge in February. I’m especially looking forward to it this year since this Feb. 7 is her 150th birthday. Hope you can join in!

On to the other challenges.

Every January Carrie hosts an L. M. Montgomery Reading Challenge. This year I’ll be reading Story Girl. which I haven’t encountered before but have heard good things about. You can find more information here.

Karen at Books and Chocolate hosts the Back to the Classics Challenge, in which she comes up with different categories for us to choose from, and we earn prize entries for completing six, nine, or twelve categories. This will be my fourth year participating in this challenge, and I really enjoy it. I’ve mentioned before that somehow I was not exposed to many classics growing up, and I’ve been trying to rectify that as an adult. It’s nice, after reading one, to think, “So that’s what that one was all about.”

As it stand now, my choices for this year are:

1. A 19th Century Classic. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

2. A 20th Century Classic. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

3. A classic by a woman author. Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

4. A classic in translation. Any book originally written or published in a language other than your native language. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

5. A classic published before 1800. Either Don Quixote (1600s) or The Confessions of St. Augustine (400s).

6. A romance classic. Lavender and Old Lace by Myrtle Read

7. A Gothic or horror classic. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

8. A classic with a number in the title. 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

9. A classic about an animal or which includes the name of an animal in the title. Old Yeller by Fred Gipson

10. A classic set in a place you’d like to visit. No Name by Wilkie Collins. I don’t have a burning desire to visit any place, but if I did, it would probably be England or Ireland. I do have a desire to read more of Collins.

11. An award-winning classic.Possibly either The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare (Newberry Medal, 1962) or A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (Pulitzer, 1945)

12. A Russian Classic.Either Resurrection or The Death of Ivan Ilych, both by Tolstoy

The purpose of the Mount TBR Challenge is to have us read as many books as we already owned before 2017. There are various levels to strive for, in 12 book increments. Last year, my first to participate, I only committed myself to the first level of 12 (Pike’s Peak) and got to the third (36 books, or Mt. Vancouver) without much trouble. But I think I am just going to commit to the second level (24 books, Mount Blanc) just to be safe and may add more later. Bev posts a monthly place for reviews and optional checkpoints once a quarter. More information, rules, and a sign-up page are here.

I’m not going to post a list of planned books this year like I did last year, preferring to just tally as I go. But I’ll show you my TBR stack, compiled of Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, and Mother’s Day gifts from the last year (and before!). In addition to these, I have a handful in my Audible library (mostly classics bought on sale in anticipation of the above challenge) and who knows how many in my Kindle app.