Tag Archives: Books

2024 Reading Plans

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I like reading challenges that broaden my horizons. But I also like the freedom to pick up a book on a whim or because it’s just out or intrigues me. I’ve participated in a number of different reading challenges over the years, and these work best with my interests and time. They work well with what I already read, but provide some challenges. They combine intentionality and flexibility.

Mount TBR Reading Challenge

Bev at My Reader’s Block hosts the Mount TBR Reading Challenge, which encourages us to get to those books we already own but have not read yet. That’s something I need to do every year, and I have enjoyed participating with Bev the last few years. She has the goals set out as a series of mountains, and we’re supposed to declare which one we’re aiming for. I think I’ll shoot for Mount Blanc (24 books), even though I’ve reached the next level a couple of years. The sign-up and more information for this challenge are here.

TBR 24 in '24 Reading challenge

The TBR 24 in ’24 Challenge hosted by Rose City Reader dovetails nicely with the Mount TBR challenge. It’s the same idea—to read books you own but haven’t read it (though rereads count, too). The difference is, we aim for 24 and list them some time during the challenge. I don’t have my whole list figured out yet, but I know I want to read Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making by Andrew Peterson, Lenten Lands by Douglas Gresham, Whose Waves These Are by Amanda Dykes, and The Lazy Genius Way by Kendra Adachi.

Nonfiction Reader Challenge

Shelly Rae at Book’d Out hosts the Nonfiction Reader Challenge. This can be done one of two ways. Shelly has twelve books in different categories that we can aim for. Or we can be a “Nonfiction Grazer” and make our own goal. Although I might hit a few of her categories, I’ll go the grazer route.

This year, I’d like to hit these categories:

  • At least one biography, autobiography, or memoir.
  • One writing book
  • One Bible study book
  • One Christian living book
  • One book of letters or journals
  • One book by C. S. Lewis that I have not read yet
  • One book on organization or productivity
  • One book pertaining to a holiday (probably Christmas)
  • One book related to midlife or aging

Finally, The Intrepid Reader. hosts the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge. A good many of my fictional reads fit this category. I’m going to aim for the Medieval level at 15 books.

I used to participate in the Back to the Classics Challenge hosted by Karen at Books and Chocolate, but she hasn’t done it the last couple of years. I miss it and hope it comes back some day. Meanwhile, I do like to read a few classics a year. I’ve made it a mission to since I wasn’t exposed to many growing up. I love the quote that a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

I’ve been trying to read through Dickens novels that I haven’t read yet. All I have left are Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, so I’ll try to read at least one of those. I’d love to read more D. E. Stevenson and Anthony Trollope. And I may revisit some old favorites like Jane Eyre.

I think that’s it for this year. Do you participate in reading challenges?

2023 Reading Challenge Wrap-Up

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Some of the reading challenges I participate in require an end-of-year wrap up.

Mount TBR Reading Challenge

Bev at My Reader’s Block hosts the Mount TBR Reading Challenge, which encourages us to get to those books we already own but have not read yet. She has the goals set out as a series of mountains, and we’re supposed to declare which one we’re aiming for.

I planned for Mt. Vancouver (36 books). I’ve easily surpassed that in previous years. But this year I only got 30 read. Still, that’s 30 books! I gave myself permission to read more hot-off-the press books or books that caught my eye this year. So though I have a little regret at not meeting a goal I could have if I had been paying attention, I don’t have any regrets about my reading last year.

I usually make a separate list of MTBR books, but this time I just noted them on my list of books read last year.

2023 Nonfiction Reader Challenge

Shelly Rae at Book’d Out hosts the Nonfiction Reader Challenge. This can be done one of two ways. Shelly has twelve books in different categories that we can aim for. Or we can be a “Nonfiction Grazer” and make our own goals.

I chose the “Grazer” route because I knew I wouldn’t read from all of Shelly’s categories. My goals and the books I read for them are (titles link to my reviews):

So, I have mixed results there. I don’t want my challenges to be stressful or controlling, but I do like them to broaden my horizons. I enjoyed the 23 nonfiction books I did read, even though I didn’t hit all my categories.

2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge

The Intrepid Reader. hosts the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge. A good many of my fictional reads fit this category. I aimed for the Medieval level at 15 books. I read 38!

And that wraps up 2023 reading. On to 2024!

Favorite Books of 2023

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Favorite books of 2023

One of my most enjoyable posts to write is naming my favorite books read each year. It’s like revisiting old friends, almost like enjoying the books all over again.

Most of these weren’t published in 2023, but were read this year.

I published a list of all the books I read in 2023 here.

As usual, the titles link back to my reviews.

Sarah Plain and Tall

Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachan is a classic, but not one I had ever read. I did see the movie version with Glenn Close years ago and loved it. A widowed farmer with two children on the prairie places an ad for a new wife. He receives a reply from Sarah in Maine, who wants to come out and visit the family. There are some bumps along the way, but the blending of a new family is told with gentleness and tenderness.

All That's Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment by Hannah Anderson

All That’s Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment by Hannah Anderson. I read Hannah’s Advent devotional, Heaven and Nature Sing, in 2022 and loved it. So I read three more of Hannah’s earlier books this year (as well as reading Heaven and Nature Sing again). I could honestly list each of them among my favorites this year. But I figured I’d just list one, and chose the first one I read. I love that Hannah approaches discernment not from the standpoint of avoiding the bad, though we need to do that. But she proposes discerning bad from good in order to pursue the good. That shift has many ramifications to our thinking.

Becoming Free Indeed by Jinger Duggar Vuolo

Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear by Jinger Duggar Vuolo. Jinger was a member of the Duggar family featured on 19 Kids and Counting. As Jinger grew up and talked with other Christian young people, including her fiance and her sister’s husband, she began to realize some of the things she had been taught were wrong. Though writing about difficult subject matter, Jinger displays a gracious spirit. I especially appreciated that she didn’t “deconstruct” her faith and throw everything out. She studied and read and sought counsel to “disentangle” the good from the bad.

Blogging for God's Glory in a Clickbait World

Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World by Benjamin Vrbicek and John Beeson helps not only with the mechanics of blogging but also with keeping our motives in the right place.

Gay Girl. Good God by Jackie Hill Perry

Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been by Jackie Hill Perry is her testimony first of all of becoming a Christian, then how Christ changed her heart and her sexuality. She’s received a lot of flack, because the world cheers people who go from straight to gay, but not gay to straight. Jackie dispels a lot of glib Christian notions about what it means to become straight. This book opened my eyes to many things. Plus I appreciated Jackie’s poetic way of expressing herself.

I read so many good novels this year, they’re harder to narrow down to a few favorites.

All That Matters by Nicole Deese

All That Really Matters by Nicole Deese is the first of Nicole’s books that I read, and so far it’s my favorite. It’s a novel of a perky social media influencer with half a million followers who needs to show a compassionate, involved side to potentially get a gig as a show host. Her brother recommends a a mentor program for kids transitioning out of the foster care program. The director, Silas, is not impressed and thinks Molly is shallow. But once they start working together, they are both changed. I loved that this book isn’t silly or frothy but goes deep.

Chasing Shadows by Lynn Austin

Chasing Shadows by Lynn Austin is a novel that follows three women in the Netherlands through WWII. One is a farmer’s wife trying to keep things together at home with food shortages, a husband absent first as a soldier, then as a member of the Resistance, and helping others in desperate need. Another is a Jewish young woman trying to find a safe place for herself and her father. The third is a young woman in her first employment outside her home. She’s dating a policeman when the Nazis take over and commandeer the police force. She’s astonished by the changes she sees in her town and starts helping the Resistance.

When the Day Comes by Gabrielle Meyer

When the Day Comes by Gabrielle Meyer has a most unusual premise for a novel: Libby Conant is a time crosser, living on alternating days in 1774 Williamsburg and 1914 New York. On her twenty-first birthday, she’ll have to decide which time she wants to stay in the rest of her life. I loved everything about this book: the characters, the history, both timelines, and the ending.

The Space Between Words by Michele Phoenix

In The Space Between Words by Michele Phoenix, a trip with friends to Paris is shattered when bombers attack a nightclub the friends were visiting. Jessica is shot, traumatized, and wants to go home as soon as possible. One friend does go home, but the other urges her to stay and go on to their flea market excursions. Jessica finds an antique sewing box with a secret compartment containing several sheets of handwritten paper and a few pages from an antique French Bible. Jessica feels compelled to learn more about the writer, who was from a family of seventeenth-century Huguenots. This story was captivating and touching and makes me want to find more of Michelle’s books.

A Place to Hang the Moon by Kate Albus

A Place to Hang the Moon by Kate Albus reads like a classic children’s book, but was just published in 2022. I agree with C. S. Lewis that children’s books can and should be enjoyed by adults, too. Three children in 1940s England were orphaned and taken in by their aloof grandmother. When the grandmother dies, the solicitor suggests the children join the evacuees being sent to the countryside: perhaps they might find a foster family that will take them in permanently. The children are billeted in a couple of problem homes and seek refuge often in the library. The kind librarian is something of an outcast herself, having a German husband who is away. I loved the well-told story, the beautifully drawn characters, the descriptions of both warm and cozy and difficult scenes, references to beloved classic children’s books, and Polly Lee’s British accent narrating the audiobook. I didn’t want the book to end.

Though part of me wants to keep listing good books. I think I’ll stop at an even ten.

Have you read any of these? What were your favorite books read last year?

(I often link up with some of these bloggers.)

Books Read in 2023

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Books read in 2023

By my count, I read 83 books last year. I’ve enjoyed a variety of older and newer, fiction and nonfiction. Reading is my favorite hobby, entertaining as well as educational. I’ll post my favorites from this list next.

I didn’t keep close records of which were audiobooks, but about half of them were, mostly in the Classics and Christian fiction categories.

The titles link to my reviews. MTBR stands for Mount TBR, or To-Be-Read, a challenge for reading books we already own.

Classics:

Nonfiction:

Christian Fiction:

Other Fiction:

I’ve already started new books for 2024!

(I often link up with some of these bloggers.)

A Few Short Christmas Book Reviews

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I was able to finish some Christmas reading the last couple of weeks, but didn’t have time to review them. Many of them were short, so I’ll bunch them all together here.

The 20th Christmas

In The 20th Christmas by Andrea Rodgers, Arianna Tate faces a parent’s worst nightmare: her almost 2-year-old son is taken from her in a coffee shop just before Christmas.

Al the searching, detectives, and appeals come up with zero results. People remembered seeing a young woman in the coffee shop, but no one could remember much about her.

For the next 20 years, Andrea and her husband descend into the lowest depths of despair. They almost lose their marriage, but make determined efforts to make things work. They’re finally able to move on, though the pain never goes away.

Meanwhile. Lydia Feller’s estranged, drug-abusing sister shows up on her doorstep with a child. Lydia had heard her sister was pregnant a while back, but the timing doesn’t seem to match up with the age of this child. When her sister dies of an overdose, Lydia adopts her child to show him love and grant some stability to his life.

Twenty years later, the pathways of all involved meet.

I felt Arianna’s life before the kidnapping was almost too perfect. And there were a number of parenthetical statements in the writing I was surprised got past an editor.

But this was a good book overall.

A Cliche Christmas

In A Cliche Christmas by Nicole Deese, Georgia Cole left heartache and humiliation in her home town of Lenox, Orgeon to become a Hollywood screenwriter famous for heartwarming but cliched Christmas movies. Since she works with Christmas themes all year, in December she usually takes her grandmother on an exotic vacation to get away from traditional Christmases.

But this year, her grandmother ropes her into putting on a Christmas play in her hometown to benefit a little girl with cancer.

Georgia runs smack into her old crush, Weston, who happens to be the uncle of the girl in question. She thought he lived elsewhere. They clash at every encounter until they finally start listening to each other.

Though in many ways this was a sweet story, I didn’t like all the manipulation going on with Georgia’s grandmother and Weston. Weston seems kind and caring in many respects, but he’s also a little pushy, pinning Georgia to a car at one point until she answers him. I don’t think the writer intended to make him seem as controlling as he came across sometimes, but in real life, I would’ve had reservations about him.

I read this because I loved a couple of Nicole’s other novels and I liked the unusual premise. Though I didn’t like this as well, I loved where the story ultimately ended up.

Shepherds Abiding

My friend Melanie mentioned rereading Shepherds Abiding at Christmas. The book comes in the middle of Jan Karon’s Mitford series. When I wanted something warm and Christmasy to finish out the year, I decided to listen to this again. I was afraid it might pull me into wanting to reread all the Mitford books. That’s a bit of a temptation, but this can be easily read as a Christmas book alone.

For me, this book was a beloved reread, enhanced by listening to the excellent audiobook version read by John McDonough.

Various subplots are going on among Mitford’s residents, but the overarching story involves Father Tim trying to restore a mismatched Nativity set bought from local antiques dealer, Andrew Gregory. He wants to do it as a surprise for his wife, but keeping a secret is hard in Mitford.

This book showcases Karon’s trademark blend of warmth, humor and truth. The version I listened to also included short stories “Esther’s Gift” and “The Mitford Snowmen.”

The Christmas Doll by Elvira Woodruff reads like an old-fashioned nineteenth-century classic, but it was published in 2000.

Two young sisters, Lucy and Glory, are orphaned and spend several years in a London workhouse with barely enough food. A deadly fever sweeps through the facility, claiming many of their friends. When Glory becomes ill, Lucy knows that if she’s taken to the infirmary, she’ll never come back. So she takes Glory and escapes.

But city streets are unfriendly to the poor, especially on winter nights. The girls suffer various mishaps. Finally someone tells them of “mudlarkers,” people who dig around in the muck by the river looking for things to sell. Lucy finds a dirty old doll with a quirky smile, setting off an unexpected series of events.

This book has some of the melodrama and fancifulness of a Dickens story. It was sweet and very well done. The audiobook was free for Audible subscribers at the time and wonderfully read by Bernadette Dunn.

I had not heard of the Christmas in My Heart series by Joe Wheeler, but apparently he’s compiled several books of Christmas stories, his own as well as others’.

The Best of Christmas in My Heart is made of several heartwarming stories from the series gathered over the years. Many are old-fashioned, but some are new. Most are fiction, but some, like John Cain’s account of Christmas in a POW camp, are true. I had not heard of most of the authors, but a few familiar ones are represented, like O. Henry and McCain. One story about a tablecloth made the rounds of the Internet a few years back.

Wheeler begins the book with telling how he came to start writing and then start compiling this series.

There are eighteen stories, so it would be easy to spread this out over December with almost a story a night.

That wraps up my Christmas reading! Have you read any of these? Did you read anything Chrismasy in December?

December Reflections

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December Reflections

December has been a busy but delightful month. My oldest son came in from RI last week, and the local kids have been over more often to see him (and us, too, of course. 🙂 ). We enjoyed Christmas together as well as a few outings (more about those on Friday’s Fave Five tomorrow), games, and lots of talking and laughing.

Usually during the last week of December, I post the books I read this year, my top ten or twelve of those books, and wrap-ups to reading challenges. Sometimes I also share the top-viewed posts of the year. This week there just hasn’t been time. I wanted to enjoy time with the family as much as possible. So I’ll at least share the bookish posts next week.

We’ve greatly simplified our Christmas activities, but we got to go to a couple of gatherings, a play, a fun Family Night at church (skits, songs, etc.). It all felt like just enough without being overwhelming.

Jim and I celebrated our 44th anniversary. We normally keep it pretty simple since it’s so close to Christmas and such a busy time. We go out to eat at a nice restaurant and exchange cards. It’s a nice time to pause and reconnect in all the busyness.

Watching

We really enjoyed All the Light We Cannot See. It had a bit of bad language. It was set during WWII, so naturally there was violence–some of it may have gone over the top. But overall it was a great movie. I’ve heard the book is excellent, but so far have not read it yet. I want to even more now.

We also enjoyed watching The Muppet Christmas Carol, most of us for the first time.

Creating

This is the card I made for Jim for our anniversary:

Anniversary card

I used a heart punch and then edged them a bit by tapping a foam brush onto an ink pad and brushing it around the edges. The “I” and “U” were stickers.

This was Jim’s Christmas card:

Christmas card for husband

This was Jeremy’s:

Son Christmas card

He likes foxes. The wording and holly border were stickers. The “snow” was embossed with the Cuttlebug.

This was Jason’s:

Son Christmas card

This was Mittu’s:

Daughter-in-law Christmas card

I did the lamppost and tree with the Cricut. The wording was a sticker.

This was Timothy’s:

Grandson Christmas card

The wording was another sticker. With making so many at once, I relied on shortcuts as much as possible. I got the stuffed snowman and hat at Hobby Lobby–they were both stickers as well, but made of fabric.

This was Jesse’s:

The words were a sticker and the tree was made with the Cricut (same tree shape as on Mittu’s card).

Reading

Since last time, I completed (titles link to my reviews):

  • Elisabeth Elliot: A Life by Lucy S. R. Austen, nonfiction (actually finished at the end of November but not reviewed til December). I enjoyed learning more about this woman who has shaped so much of my own thinking. The author did well with harmonizing material from several sources, but I felt she was too critical.
  • Abide Bible study course on 1, 2, and 3 John by Jen Wilkin, not reviewed.
  • Heaven and Nature Sing by Hannah Anderson, nonfiction. This was a reread, linked to last year’s review. I am so glad I read it again this year. Though I fondly remembered some parts, I had totally forgotten others. Excellent, very highly recommended.
  • Secrets She Kept by Cathy Gohlke, fiction, audiobook. A woman in the 70s travels to Germany to learn more about the mother with whom she’d had a difficult relationship and finds some surprising information about the family she never knew. Excellent.
  • Crown of Thorns by Sigmund Brouwer, fiction, is set in Charleston , one of my favorite places. It’s a bit of a departure from my usual preferences, but was still good.
  • The Christmas Angel Project by Melody Carlson, fiction, audiobook. Four friends mourn another who has just died and start a project in her memory. Very good.
  • O Little Town, three novellas by Amanda Wen, Janyre Tromp and Deborah Raney, set in a small Michigan town in three different time periods. Very good.
  • A Cliche Christmas by Nicole Deese, fiction, audiobook, not reviewed yet.
  • The 20th Christmas, fiction, not reviewed yet.

That might look like a lot, especially for December, but the Christmas books were short.

I’m currently reading:

  • Be Skillful (Proverbs): God’s Guidebook to Wise Living by Warren Wiersbe, nonfiction
  • Proverbs for Life for Women
  • Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making by Andrew Peterson
  • Being Elisabeth Elliot by Ellen Vaughn (mentioned this last time but set it aside for Christmas reading)
  • How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One by Stanley Fish (had also set this aside for a time)
  • Shepherds Abiding by Jan Karon, the Mitford book set during Christmas. Another lovely reread, via audiobook this time.
  • The Best of Christmas in My Heart, a collection of short stories written or compiled by Joe Wheeler.

Blogging

Besides the weekly Friday Fave Fives, Saturday Laudable Linkage, and book reviews, I’ve posted these since last time:

Writing

As you can imagine, there’s not been much activity on that front this month. I’m hoping to be more disciplined and regular about it next year. I’m looking forward to our writing Critique group resuming.

We’re soaking up family together time for the next few days. I have not even thought much about next year yet. Time enough for that next month. I don’t choose a word for the year or make resolutions per se, but I like to evaluate different areas and set goals.

Have a wonderful and safe rest of 2023!

Review: O Little Town

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O Little Town Christmas novellas

O Little Town is a collection of three stories by three different authors. The town in question is not Bethlehem, but Mapleview, Michigan. Each author’s story takes place in a different time.

Hopes and Fears by Amanda Wen begins in a two-room schoolhouse in November, 1912. Emma Trowbridge teaches the younger students and loves her job. She’s dismayed to learn that her mentor and boss who teaches the upper grades has to take leave due to a family emergency. But she’s totally floored to find out that his replacement is Frederick Oberstein, her rival and nemesis all through school.

Frederick went away for a four-year degree, but Emma took classes at a nearby teaching college. They had not seen each other in years. They start clashing almost immediately. What Emma mistakes as Frederick’s curmudgeonly ways actually reflect weariness and grief. Can they learn not only to work together, but to actually appreciate each other’s gifts?

While Mortals Sleep by Janyre Tromp takes place during WWII. Eleanor Sweers had left her dysfunctional family years ago to become a reporter in California. She comes home due to her sister’s death, the only relative with whom she had a bond. She’s shocked to discover her sister named her as her daughter’s guardian. An old family friend, Gideon Braum, is a lawyer who helps Eleanor (nicknamed Lennie) through the legal process.

Something about Lennie’s sister’s death doesn’t add up, though. Lennie can’t turn off her reporter’s instincts and begins to investigate. She’s stunned to find evidence of a Japanese balloon bomb, similar to one she researched in CA. What is a Japanese bomb doing in Mapleview, MI? Gideon helps her learn more.

The Wondrous Gift by Deborah Raney takes place in present time. The faculty of a small Christian school is stunned to learn the school is closing due to low enrollment and high costs. After the announcement, some of the teachers agree to meet and talk about the situation further. Music teacher Rachel Hamblin and coach Caleb Janssen end up riding together, but they misunderstood where the other teachers were going. As they get to know each other, they hit it off and wonder why they had not noticed each other before.

Though sad about losing their jobs, they each harbor dreams about what they’d really like to do. They cheer each other on as they think, pray, talk, and take tentative steps in their new ventures. Things are going amazingly well until they realize that only one of them can have what they both wanted. Can they work through the issues, or will this derail their fledgling relationship?

I enjoyed experiencing stories in the same small town in different eras. It was fun to occasionally recognize a person or item from the previous era, though I probably missed some of those connections.

I’m afraid the characters in the first story didn’t resonate with me quite as much. Emma’s “force of nature” personality and Frederick’s faulty reasoning both hit me the wrong way.

And the second story’s writing seemed excessive in places. For example, “The hot, laughing breath of the reaper sighed on my neck even as he shoveled dirt over my self-made grave” and “It was a missive from the devil written in the blood of my regrets.”

Plus the narration of the audiobook I listened to seemed overwrought in the first two stories.

The third story was my favorite. I enjoyed the banter between the two characters and the progression of the story. The narration seemed more natural here.

Overall this was an enjoyable Christmas read. I liked that it wasn’t light and fluffy: each story dealt with serious issues and feelings. Each story was clean and seamlessly incorporated Christian truths and principles.

Review: The Christmas Angel Project

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In The Christmas Angel Project by Melody Carson, five friends who are different ages and from different walks of life have been meeting together regularly for a book club. Just after Thanksgiving, one of the women, Abby, dies unexpectedly. She seems to have been the glue that kept them together and inspired them.

Some days after Abby’s memorial service, the other women meet together to decide what to do about the group–whether to keep meeting, invite more people, or disband. Abby’s husband gave the group a bag of Christmas gifts that Abby had prepared for them before she passed. They opened them together at their meeting. Abby had made an angel ornament for each of them with their individual characteristics.

Inspired by Abby’s example, the women decide to change their book club to a “Christmas angel” club. Each will choose a project involving their own unique gifts, talents, and resources and report back to each other once a week in lieu of reading books.

Belinda is Abby’s long-time personal friend, divorced with a college-age child. She started a thrift shop years ago that has become something of a boutique.

Cassidy is the youngest, a single veterinarian who struggles with self-confidence.

Grace is newest to the group. She and Belinda had an undercurrent of rivalry for Abby’s friendship. Grace and her husband argue over their twin’s lack of effort in college, among other things. Grace has her own home design business.

Louisa is the oldest of the group. Her husband passed away the year before. Now Abby’s passing has really affected her. She had been an artist, but hasn’t been inspired to create anything since her husband died. She wonders what she’s still doing here, why God didn’t take her instead of Abby.

As each woman struggles to decide what to do for her project, they each experience ups and downs, successes and failures, and learn more about themselves and others in the process.

It’s understandable that the book would start off sad. But it did seem a little depressing at first, especially for a Christmas story. The years when we were most grieving a loss, I don’t know if it would have been helpful to read a book like this or not.

But once they got going on their projects, the story picked up. I did enjoy the book overall. I was happy I discovered the audiobook free in Audible’s members’ Plus Catalog.

Review: Crown of Thorns

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Crown of Thorns is the second in Sigmund Brouwer’s Nick Barrett Mystery Series, the first being Out of the Shadows (linked to my review).

Nick Barrett had grown up in Charleston high society as an outsider. His father was from an old, established family, but his mother was a waitress. In the first book, he had come back to Charleston after several years’ absence when he received an unsigned note promising information about his mother’s disappearance.

At the beginning of this book, Nick is still in Charleston, on a break from his teaching duties in New Mexico, embroiled with his half-brother in a court battle over the family inheritance.

While he waits, he visits frequently with a couple of old friends from his former years in Charleston, elderly twin sisters who own an antique shop. They ask him to help with a dilemma. A young girl from a crime-ridden side of town had come to them trying to sell a four-hundred-year old valuable painting that had been stolen from one of Charleston’s elite families fifty years earlier. They wanted to know, among other things, how this girl had come by the painting.

When Nick meets the eleven-year-old girl named Angel, he has no idea what he’s about to get into.

The plot weaves threads from a fifty-year-old murder, a young mother trying to escape from an abusive cult run by her father-in-law, and Angel’s voodoo-practicing grandmother.

If I had just started with this one and hadn’t read the first book or others of Brouwer’s, I probably would not have gotten past the prologue with its talk of voodoo spells. I just like to stay as far away as possible from that kind of thing. But I had read enough of the author’s work to trust he wouldn’t steer me wrong. He’s not promoting those practices and doesn’t go into gratuitous detail. And, as Nick’s journey has been spiritual as well as familial, the author clearly includes the offsetting truth of the gospel.

I look forward to reading the concluding book in the series.

Review: Secrets She Kept

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Secrets She Kept by Cathy Gohlke

In Secrets She Kept by Cathy Gohlke, Hannah Stirling’s mother has just passed away. More than mourning her mother, she mourns the loss of what could have been. Hannah’s mother had been distant from Hannah and her father for as long as she could remember.

Going through her parents’ home for some clue about her mother’s past turns out to be fruitless. When she sees the lawyer to finalize her mother’s affairs, Hannah is surprised to be given a key to a safe deposit box that Hannah had never known about. But all she finds there is her parents’ wedding certificate, her father’s military discharge papers, and a few empty envelopes with German addresses and stamps on them.

The paperwork, however, lets her know a shocking surprise: the man she called Daddy all her life could not have been her real father.

The point of view switches to thirty years earlier in Germany, when Hannah’s mother, Lieselotte Sommer, was a teenager just before Kristallnacht. Her mother lay dying, her brother was a whole-hearted member of the Hitler Youth, and her father was a rising member of the Nazi party. Lieselotte had loved her brother’s friend, Lukas Kirchmann, for as long as she could remember. She helps him and his family help Jews with food, false papers, and anything else they can. She longs for the day they can marry.

But Lieselotte’s father puts pressure on her to marry a Nazi officer and raise Aryan children for the Fuhrer. Her father has been distracted, but she never guessed the depths he would go to to further his own ends.

Switching back to Hannah again, her lawyer researches the German addresses on the envelopes in her mother’s safe deposit box. He discovers that she has a grandfather she never knew about. Her mother, Lieselotte, had said she was from Austria and her family all died in the war.

Hannah travels to Germany to meet her grandfather, to try to find out more about her mother, and to discover who her father was. At first she enjoys the connection with her grandfather. But her research uncovers horrifying family secrets.

This book was riveting. I listened to the audiobook, free at the time from Audible’s Plus Catalog, and eventually began looking for extra time to listen more. All the characters, including side characters, are well-developed and the plot. There’s so much more I’d love to say, but I don’t want to spoil anything for potential readers. So I’ll just say it’s a really good book and highly recommended.