Review: Now and Then and Always

Posted on May 2, 2024 by Barbara Harper

In Now and Then and Always, a novel by Melissa Tagg, Mara Bristol found refuge. Her father had left the family when she was a child. Her mother was so distraught that she was emotionally unavailable to Mara. When her mother died, Mara found various nanny jobs until the last one ended in disaster and danger.

Learning of the Everwood Bed and Breakfast through a rest stop brochure, Mara heads to Maple Valley, Iowa, to find it. The building is charming with good bones, but it’s a little run down. However, it is presided over by a sweet older lady, Lenora, who takes Mara in. Mara is not a Christian and had never felt she was important enough for God to notice. But Lenora sees her as a God-sent daughter. Mara’s stay extends for months.

Then one day, Lenora has to take a trip and asks Mara to take care of the B&B until she returns.

Except she doesn’t return. She doesn’t have a cell phone, so Mara can’t contact her. When foreclosure notices arrive, Mara wonders if Lenora knew of the impending doom and fled. Once again, Mara feels forsaken and alone.

One stormy night, Detective Marshall Hawkins arrives on the Everwood’s doorstep. His only daughter had died two years before, and he’s stuck in his grief. His wife left him. He nearly got addicted to painkillers for constant migraines. He refused to admit anything was wrong, until mistakes in his job led his captain to put him on administrative leave. Marshall packed up and headed out with no destination in mind until stumbling upon Everwood, which looks just like the ideal house that his daughter loved in a magazine ad.

Mara becomes friends with some of the townspeople and with Marshall, who help her renovate Everwood. But as the house reveals its secrets they begin to wonder if Lenora knew them and if she is in danger.

There’s a lot going on in this book. Each main character and even the side characters have multiple issues. Then there’s the house itself and its secrets and background. The mystery of what went on there and what happened to Lenora were both quite good mysteries.

I ended up enjoying the book and I was glad I stuck with it, but I was about ready to toss it during the first two chapters. Much of the dialogue was extremely stilted due to paragraphs of backstory or description or information between each line.

Some of my favorite quotes:

Far be it for me to speak for the Almighty, but I feel fairly confident saying God isn’t looking for impressive people. He’s looking for people who are willing to be impressed by Him.

But I don’t want to spend my life letting my pain be the lens through which I see the world.

Kindness is its own shade of heroism.

Don’t underestimate God’s ability to use even the things we label as random.

She didn’t have to know how it would all work. She just had to take the next step.

I listened to the audiobook, which is free for Audible subscribers until May 7.

Review: Whose Waves These Are

Posted on April 24, 2024 by Barbara Harper

Whose Waves These Are by Amanda Dykes begins in September, 1944. Identical twin brothers in a small Maine village, Ansel-by-the -Sea, have just turned eighteen. Enlistment in military service has been closed “to protect the home-front work force,” but the draft is in effect. A letter arrives from the President ordering one of the twins to report for duty. Robert Bliss assumes, hopes, the letter is for him. He’s single, ready to go. His brother, Roy, is married to Jenny–the girl Robert has loved for years but didn’t speak up for soon enough. Roy and Jenny have just discovered they’re going to be parents.

But, no. The letter is for Roy.

Robert proposes that he could go in Roy’s place. They’ve stood in for each other many times. But Roy argues that it’s his turn to help save others.

Then we’re whisked to Chicago in 2001, where Annie Bliss crunches numbers. She was an anthropology major, but her first assignment to help a small village ended in disaster. In her current job, at least she can’t hurt anybody.

Then she receives news that her “Grandbob” back in Ansel-by-the-Sea is in grave condition in the hospital.

Annie speeds back to Maine, where she had visited as a child when her parents’ deployments overlapped and they left her with Bob. There she is known as “Bob’s Annie.”

While Bob is unconscious, Annie gets reacquainted with the people she knew. There’s one newcomer since she lived there, a quiet, brooding postman and EMT named Jeremiah Fletcher, or Fletch. Annie discovers boxes of rocks in a closet in Bob’s house. Jeremiah shows her even more in the boathouse. Bob has left her a key, but no word about what it belongs to. As Annie asks around town, people either don’t know or aren’t sharing what Bob was up to.

The point of view switches back and forth between these two time frames. The older one unfolds what happened with the brothers during the war and the years afterward. As one grieves the loss of the other, he writes the only poem of his life asking for rocks to represent people lost during the war. He plans to build something to represent hope and healing. But another tragedy halts his efforts.

The twenty-first century timeline shares Annie’s story and shows her discovering the pieces of her history that she had not known.

I loved this book. I just wanted to sit and hug it after finishing it. It left me wishing I could visit Ansel-by-the-Sea, if it were a real place and these people lived there. I love books with a strong sense of place, whose stories could not have taken place anywhere else.

I loved the characters. I loved the way the author unfolded and wove together everyone’s stories.

I also loved many of the author’s turns of phrases. A few:

A wake is a ripple left after a departure (p. 41).

He said it was time to be part of the unbreaking, of the making of something. He told me there was a Carpenter who was going to build me right up, too (p. 75).

She looks at Bob lying there, face mapped in wrinkles carved from compassion (p. 79).

She’s used to city life, rich in its own way, with an energy and bustle from the lives there, but where eye contact is a safety issue and a good neighbor is your insurance company’s tagline (p. 87).

Annie tries for small talk. Which, as she’d learned, could sometimes lead to large talk. Which made the small talk bearable (p. 131).

Don’t get stuck in the dark . . . There’s a whole lotta light . . . Go there instead (p. 171).

Saluting—a stance of the fiercest heartache schooled into firmest respect (p. 173).

The song she offered up was all the more beauitful in its wavering and brokenness. Courageous, and offering. The laying out of her broken heart before her God (p. 188).

Words begin to light up, pour right through, like someone turned on a faucet and he’s just trying to catch them. They’re not his, really, he’s just the one scratching them out (p. 188).

He slaps courage back into himself and goes to church (p. 202).

I choose to believe there is some shred of light left in him. A light I pray he fights for (p. 238).

His thoughts are becoming more like an ongoing conversation with heaven, these days—usually more questions than anything else. And this was a big one. What now? (p. 249).

He looks like someone who’s been cut loose to drift and hasn’t found shore (p. 252).

Not healed . . . but held. Like the pieces of him have been gathered right up, and that is enough for now. The rest will follow (p. 275).

The strength of the storm does not change whose waves these are. There is One mightier still (p. 348).

I was motivated to read this book because I had seen high praise for it. That praise was well-deserved. I’ll be looking up more of Amanda Dykes’ books to read.

Review: You’re the One that I Want

Posted on April 23, 2024 by Barbara Harper

You're the One that I Want by Susan May Warren

You’re the One that I Want is the sixth book in Susan May Warren’s Christiansen family series set in Deep Haven. Minnesota.

Though each book involves the whole family, each focuses primarily focuses on one of the adult children. This time it’s Owen’s turn, the fifth child and youngest brother.

Owen had figured heavily in the first two books as well, especially the second. He had played hockey since his earliest childhood and excelled through the ranks until he landed a spot on the MN pro team. The fame, acclaim, and money all went to his head, however. He became something of an entitled jerk until a tragic accident took the sight in one eye, derailing his career.

Exploding with anger and grief, Owen roamed about, working different jobs, leaving a trail of one-night stands behind him.

What he doesn’t know is that one of those encounters resulted in a pregnancy. The girl in question later met and fell in love with Owen’s brother, Casper.

If that sounds kind of soap-opera-ish, yes, even one character admitted as much. However, people do get themselves entangled in such messes, though maybe not within their own family.

As this book opens, Owen’s anger has been spent. He’s cleaned up his act, more or less, no longer involved in reckless behavior. He’s on a crab-fishing boat in the Bering Sea with a reputation for kindness and hard work. He just takes life a day at a time, too ashamed to go home.

Scotty is the captain’s daughter and first mate. Her mother had died in childbirth. Her father makes her call him Red rather than Dad and suppresses emotion. Scotty has been on the boat most of her life. She’s had to be tough to command the men in her father’s stead and ward off any unwanted attention.

When Scotty is swept overboard in a storm, Owen jumps in to save her. They spend a night in a life raft until they’re rescued, nursing injuries and telling each other their lives.

Casper and Raina had worked out their issues in the fourth book. Casper wants to marry Raina and raise her daughter as his own. But he feels the right thing to do would be to track down Owen, tell him the situation, and bring him home. He wants to get Owen’s blessing and ask him to sign over his rights to his daughter.

Meanwhile, Casper is unaware that he’s wanted for questioning in the murder of Raina’s old boyfriend, Monty. He and Casper had an altercation the night Monty was killed, and Casper seems to be the last one who saw him alive.

When Owen and Casper try to fly home, Casper is taken into custody. Scotty, who has taken a job in the police force in Alaska since her dad is selling their boat, agrees to accompany them back to Deep Haven in an official capacity. Owen is thrilled to have more time with her.

There, Scotty encounters the love and loyalty of a family like she has never known. Though she’s drawn to them, she’s also not sure she would ever fit in. She’s had a very different upbringing and has no use for faith—even though she did break down and pray through Owen’s injuries.

If that sounds like a lot of drama for one book—it is! I’ve mentioned before that though these books fall into the romance genre, they’re something of a family drama as well.

Reading, or listening to, six of these books in a row, one catches some of the writer’s repeated quirks. Here are a few:

Several of the female characters are said to catch their lip in their teeth.
All the males are “sculpted” and “chiseled.”
Most of the kissing scenes involve saying what one or the other “tastes” like, usually involving whatever they last ate or drank (yuck) and and then adding that they taste of “freedom” or “summer days” or some such.

I roll my eyes at some of that, but that seems to go with this genre—one reason I don’t read it much.

I did like how the series wrapped up, though. Amid some of the silly moments were embedded some deep truths about faith, grace, and forgiveness.

Some of my favorite quotes:

In order to live without the haunting voice of regret, you must learn to forgive yourself, to embrace mercy, to open your eyes and see God in your past and His grace in your future. Your mistakes don’t define you. Your past doesn’t define you. You are not the sum of your bad decisions. You are the decision you make right now.

Fresh-baked cookies do not make a successful marriage . . . It’s knowing each other, valuing the same things, being what the other person can’t be, making each other better people.

So you made some bad choices. Some of God’s best players were His imperfect, broken prodigals. In fact, iffy players are God’s best picks. He specializes in short-tempered, reckless, flawed people to accomplish his plans.

God is constantly using broken, messy people to restore the world and bring glory to Himself, to touch other people.

Once you became a Christiansen, you had to get used to being loved large, to belonging to a family that didn’t have it all figured out, but weathered life by holding on to faith.

Unfortunately, the audiobooks didn’t include author’s notes, and Susan didn’t have any notes or background information on her website for the last two books in the series as she did for the previous ones.

Besides these major books in the series, there’s a prequel novella focused on the relationship of the parents, John and Ingrid, as well as two Christmas novellas. There’s also another collection of novels set in Deep Haven written after the Christiansen family series with other authors. However, though I enjoyed the series, I want to get away from romances for a while. I’ll probably read John and Ingrid’s story just to finish out the series and save the Christmas ones for December.

Review: The Wonder of You

Posted on April 16, 2024 by Barbara Harper

The Wonder of You is the fifth in Susan May Warren’s Christiansen family series.

So far, each book has focused on one of the six siblings in small-town Minnesota family in birth order. The last two books flip the order, though.

Amelia is the youngest and always wanted to venture out, away from Deep Haven. She took a photography course in Prague, but came home early. She had met a man there, Roark St. John, and thought they were in love. But when she saw him with someone else, she came home, brokenhearted.

She’s disappointed in herself, but figures maybe she was wrong about her life direction: maybe she’s meant to stay in Deep Haven after all and marry the boy she’s known all her life and dated through high school, Seth.

Then Roark shows up on her family’s doorstep one day with flowers and an apology. Her brothers run him off, but Amelia feels she should at least listen to what he has to say.

Roark has given himself two months to try to win Amelia back before giving in to his uncle’s insistence that he come home to Brussels and take over the family business.

Amelia has insisted that there be no lying between them, but Roark is not sure how much he should tell her about his past mistakes and his fear that God has forsaken him.

In one subplot, a visiting family drowns, leaving behind their newly-adopted daughter from Ukraine who speaks no English. She comes to stay with the Christiansen family, growing close to Grace. When it appears she might be sent back to the Ukraine, Grace begins to wonder if she and Max could adopt her. But Max had long ago determined not to have children. He carries the gene of a disease that killed his father, and he is not going to leave behind fatherless children to experience the same tragedy he did.

Amelia’s character is somewhat immature, but she’s only twenty. She deals with what a lot of young people go through in trying to discern what God wants them to do in life. I liked that the author brought out that calling is not only a matter of which guy, which vocation, and which country one should choose, but having a heart that pursues God, trusts in His sufficiency, and wants to do His will.

And Roark needed to learn that the past is forgivable and God gives grace for each new day.

As I’ve said before, I like stories where the characters learn and grow, whether that story is a romance or another genre. That’s certainly the case in this series.

Review: Always On My Mind

Posted on April 4, 2024 by Barbara Harper

Always On My Mind is the fourth novel in the Christiansen family series by Susan May Warren.

Casper is the fourth child and middle son of the family. The previous book, When I Fall in Love, focused on his older sister, Grace, but also shared Casper’s budding relationship with a new girl in town, Raina.

After a big blow-up near the end of that book, Casper, an archeology major, accepted an invitation to a dig in Honduras. He’s always felt overshadowed by his brothers and wants to do something to stand out on his own. But this dig is going nowhere. Even a side project yields no results. He can’t get Raina off his mind. He decides to forgive the past, go home, and tell Raina he loves her.

But when he gets home, he is surprised to discover that Raina is pregnant and shocked to learn who the father is. Further, Raina wants him to go away and leave her alone.

Raina still loves Caspar, but feels she is damaged and no good for him.

Casper goes back to Deep Haven to help at his family’s resort and work in town until he can decide what to do next. He also helps out at the town Historical Society, where he’s surprised to discover that Raina has come back to Deep Haven, too. Their work throws them together, so they form a tentative friendship.

Caspar is dismayed when Raina starts dating Monty, a bully he knew from high school. But Monty turns on the charm with Raina, and she delights in feeling special in his eyes.

One subplot involves Casper’s discovery of clues from an old local legend about a missing gangster and the steel bonds he supposedly left hidden somewhere.

Another involves oldest brother Darek, featured in the first book in the series, who has taken over running his parents’ resort after they retired. But the responsibilities of repairs and projects and the lack of customers and therefore income weigh heavily on him. His long hours away from home start taking a toll on his family. He wonders if he should go back to firefighting.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not keen on romances. But I do like good stories where people learn, grow, and overcome. Susan’s stories don’t have the silliness and physicality that some romances do. Plus, I got invested in the family in the first book, and since the series was free at Audible for a time, I decided to follow through.

Susan had written here that part of her reason for writing this series was that she and her husband were in the season of parenting adult children, and she wanted to write about “watching, hoping, praying your adult children into a legacy of faith.” The Christiansen parents, John and Ingrid, are somewhat background characters in the books, but emerge to share a word of wisdom, guidance, or encouragement here and there.

Each story begins a beautiful letter that Ingrid has written to the child featured in that book.

Susan writes that part of her focus in this particular novel is “What do you do when you love someone who seems bent on self-destruction? Worse, when they seem incapable of listening to reason? Pray. Hope. Love anyway.”

There’s kind of an obvious symbolism between Casper’s hunt for lost treasure and Raina being a type of lost treasure.

My only difficulty with this story is that I didn’t care for Raina at first. I didn’t have a problem with the fact that she was a “broken soul,” had a lot of baggage, and needed redemption. I just didn’t see any qualities that would cause Casper to fall in love with her. But by the end of this story, I did.

On a side note, for some reason, the audiobook covers are different from the e-book and print covers. I like the book covers much better.

Review: A Noble Scheme

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Barbara Harper

A Noble Scheme is the second novel in Roseanna M. White’s Imposters series. The first book, A Beautiful Disguise, established that The Imposters were a private investigation firm in the early 1900s. Siblings Yates and Marigold Fairfax learned that their father’s spendthrift ways had left no money. One of his whimsical purchases had been an entire circus which stayed at the estate when not traveling. The circus performers and animals became close friends of the Fairfaxes. Yates and Marigold had learned acrobatics, theatrics, and other performance tricks from them. They decided to use these skills to support themselves and their circus friends by maintaining their place in society and secretively, in disguise, investigating matters for high-end clientele.

However, in A Nobel Scheme, a waiter comes to them–someone who could not afford them. Yet when they hear that his son has been kidnapped, mistaken for his almost identical wealthy cousin, the team accepts the case pro bono.

Gemma Parks is also part of the Imposters. She writes a society column as G. M. Parker and fills in however she can. She keeps her ears open in society functions and sometimes masquerades as Marigold so Marigold can look for clues.

Graham Wharton is the Fairfaxe’s distant cousin who came to live with them when his parents died. He’s an architect who can help the Fairfaxes find tunnels or keeps or hiding places in old houses.

Graham and Gemma had grown up together and fallen in love. But in the last book, they were estranged. Several references were made to what had happened between them, but that situation wasn’t explained until this book. It’s a pretty big reveal, so I won’t spoil it.

Gemma avoids Graham as much as she can, but they try to put aside their differences for the cases they are working on. This particular case throws them together more than normal. Graham hopes to win Gemma back, but she can’t forgive him. He, in turn, blames God. He acknowledges his foolishness in what happened, but God could have prevented it.

I love that this series is different from the usual historical fiction fare. The themes of faith and forgiveness are woven in naturally. Roseanna is one of my favorite authors, and this book didn’t disappoint.

Some of my favorite quotes:

The more she wrote for herself, the more herself she became.

Words were wily things—but they were miraculous too. They created, they shaped, they breathed life. God had used them to form the universe, and Christ had come as a living Word to write Himself onto the hearts of humankind. Was it any wonder, then, that words had pulled her from the brink of darkness and delivered her, however slowly, back to the Light?

I enjoyed the audiobook nicely read by Susan Lyons. Sadly, the audiobook didn’t include any author’s notes. But I found this interview in which Roseanna shares how she came to write about nobility hosting a circus and investigating in disguise.

Review: When I Fall in Love

Posted on March 21, 2024 by Barbara Harper

Susan May Warren’s Christiansen family series centers on six fictional adult siblings and their parents and friends in the small town of Deep Haven, Minnesota. The family runs an old-fashioned resort (cabins but no Internet).

Though all the family plus several side characters appear in each book, each focuses mainly on the story of one sibling.

When I Fall in Love is the third in the series, about second-oldest sister Grace. Grace loves cooking and wants to go to culinary school. But she’s also a homebody who doesn’t like to venture out of her comfort zone.

When she caters her oldest brother’s wedding, the family thanks her by pitching in to surprise her with a three-week trip to a cooking school in Hawaii.

But Grace is not pleased. She’s terrified.

Her sister’s fiance, a hockey player on the professional team in Minneapolis, chose this particular school because his teammate, Max Sharp, is going there, too. He asks Max to keep an eye on Grace and help her out.

Max is less than thrilled. He goes on a cooking vacation each year somewhere where he’s not known. He gives the bulk of his year to hockey. For that one month, he just wants to get away by himself and do something different.

Grace is not happy, either. She doesn’t want Max to feel he has to baby-sit her.

But when they meet on the airplane, each not knowing who the other is at first—well, this is a romance novel, so you know they are going to be attracted.

The problem is, Max never planned to be attracted to anyone. He’s the carrier for a disease that killed his father early and will probably take his life as well. He can never ask a woman to be part of his life knowing what she will have to go through, only to end up alone.

Grace tests his resolve, though.

In the subplot, Grace’s friend and coworker, Raina, had helped cater Grace’s brother’s wedding. She’s fairly new to town and has had a hard background. Her only remaining family is her aunt Liza in Deep Haven. Raina is not religious, but she attends church because her aunt requires her to.

Grace’s brother, Owen, seeks Raina out after the wedding, making Raina feel special. But she doesn’t know that Owen is in a downward spiral. He was a rising hockey star, only to be sidelined by a devastating injury. The fame and money had gone to his head, and the injury and loss of his career has sent him further to the wild side. He only uses Raina for a one-night stand.

Raina is bitter against all the Christiansen men. But when she gets to know Casper, the college-aged brother home for a semester, she finds he is much different from Owen.

I liked the themes of getting out of one’s comfort zone and trusting God with the unknowns in life.

I didn’t like so much the family pushing Grace out of her comfort zone. Older sister Eden, in particular, comes across really pushy and bossy here. I hadn’t gotten that vibe from her in the book focusing on her (It Had to Be You). Not only does she propel Grace into the trip, she wants Grace to cater her wedding with Hawaiian food–as if cooking in Hawaii for three weeks makes Grace an expert. The fact that Eden didn’t listen to Grace and kept insisting really bothered me.

Plus, the author has God answering Grace directly several times when she prays about something.

Also, though we’re spared a bedroom scene with Owen’s indiscretion, we’re still shown more than I would have liked.

Even with those caveats, though, I found much to enjoy in this story. Just like in real life, we get ourselves in messes. But God offers healing and redemption.

I had listened to the audiobook, which unfortunately didn’t contain any of the author’s notes about what inspired this story. However, I did find a bit of background on Susan’s site here.

Review: It Had to Be You

Posted on March 14, 2024 by Barbara Harper

In It Had to Be You by Susan May Warren, Eden Christiansen feels like she’s forever on the sidelines. Her other siblings have stand-out talents. Eden always dreamed of being a reporter. She landed a job with the city newspaper, but she’s stuck as an obituary writer.

Since she lives in the same town as her younger hockey-player brother, Owen, and she’s the only family member there, she goes to his games and watches out for him. She sees that the fame, acclaim, and money has gone to his head. But he won’t listen to her admonitions. It doesn’t help that Owen idolizes his team captain, Jace, who has a bad-boy reputation on and off the ice.

When Jace and Eden meet, they clash immediately. She berates him for not being a better example to his team.

Jace, meanwhile, has his own problems. Several slams on the ice have resulted in too many concussions and regular migraines. He has nothing else but hockey, so he keeps going despite doctors’ warnings. When he tries to avoid fights during games, his value drops in the eyes of his team, agent, and the spectators.

And there is a side to Jace that others rarely see. He helps his best friend, Sam, run a restaurant and helps Sam take care of his daughter, a heart transplant patient.

Owen, in a moment of carelessness, sustains a devastating injury. While visiting him in the hospital, Jace and Eden accidentally discover a John Doe, an unidentified patient in a coma. They are thrown together to try to find John Doe’s family.

I don’t read romance novels very often. They can be somewhat silly and too focused on the physical. But Susan’s don’t seem to be that way so far.

I got a little irritated with both characters’ tendency to create a whole scenario of what they thought the other was thinking from a line or gesture or silence. It’s not usually good to assume motives no matter how well we know someone. But learning not to judge or assume is part of what they experienced here.

Another theme throughout the book is letting go of things we can’t and weren’t meant to control.

Overall, I enjoyed the story. A couple of my favorite quotes:

Minnesota grew hockey players like pine trees.

There’s always light . . . God’s love is too bright for the darkness to win.

This book is the second in the Christiansen family series. The first was Take a Chance on Me. Since the sequels were free in Audible’s Plus Catalog, I am listening to them before they are rotated out.

Review: Dandelion Summer

Posted on March 5, 2024 by Barbara Harper

In Dandelion Summer by Lisa Wingate, J. Norman Alvord is a retired widower with heart trouble. As he fades in and out of consciousness from an angina incident, he has a vivid memory of a house with seven chairs and a black maid. His mother never had a maid, and he was an only child. Norman wonders if this is truly a memory or a figment of his imagination. If it’s real, where was this house and who was the woman?

Norman’s daughter, Deborah, is at her wit’s end with her curmudgeonly father. They’ve never gotten along, but she promised her mother she’d take care of him. She tries to nudge him to think about moving to a facility. but he refuses. So for the short term, she hires a woman to come in once a week to clean her father’s house and the woman’s daughter to come in two days a week after school to make dinner, clean up the kitchen, and keep an eye out for her dad.

The daughter, Epiphany, has an Italian mother and black father, though her father is long gone. Epiphany, or Epie, as she is sometimes called, doesn’t feel like she fits in anywhere. She’s bullied at school until the school’s basketball star takes a liking to her. But he is bad news.

Epie and Norman don’t hit it off at first. They are opposites in almost every way. But when Epie agrees to keep some of his secrets, like Norman’s searching for clues about the house in his dreams upstairs, where his daughter has forbidden him to go, Norman grudgingly accepts Epie’s presence. Eventually he tells her what he s searching for and accepts her help bringing boxes from the attic.

Clues and more emerging memories lead Norman and Epie to a road trip for more information. But with Norman’s heart trouble and Epie’s inexperience, will they make it?

The point of view switched back and forth between Norman and Epie. I listened to the audiobook wonderfully read by Jason Culp and Bahni Turpin. Their voices and expressions added so much more to the reading/listening experience.

This book was the fourth in Wingate’s Blue Sky Hill series. I hadn’t read any except the second book, The Summer Kitchen, but I didn’t feel there were any gaps that didn’t make sense. This book stood well enough on its own.

Though I thought the road trip was unlikely in real life, the author made it plausible. I enjoyed the slowly developing relationship between Norman and Epie–first just tolerating each other, then learning to appreciate things about each other, and then coming to truly care for each other like a grandparent and grandchild.

The mystery of Norman’s background was unraveled quite nicely, keeping me curious and invested throughout the book.

I was struck by how both Norman and Epie were misunderstood from the outside. In the book, we’re privy to their thoughts and circumstances that no one else knows. Epie seems like an underachieving student to her teachers, but they have no idea what she has to deal with from the other students and a mom who has gone from man to man. And they don’t take the time to find out what underlying problems there might be. Yet Norman can see her innate intelligence and the need to be nurtured.

Some quotes that stood out to me:

Maybe not everyone got the mom who baked cupcakes and showed up at all the school parties. There weren’t enough of those to go around, so maybe God used other people, like Mrs. Lora and J. Norm, to make sure you learned how to shell a purple hull pea or find Saturn in the night sky.

I would have lived more fully in the moment, realize how easily a perfect day can slip by unnoticed. Any day is the glory day if you choose to see the glory in it.

It’s funny how mistakes are so much clearer after you’ve already made them.

Wingate has a penchant for sometimes halting the flow of dialogue by putting extra information between the speaker’s answers (one of my writing pet peeves). But overall, I really enjoyed this book.

Review: Take a Chance on Me

Posted on February 28, 2024 by Barbara Harper

In Take a Chance on Me by Susan May Warren, Darek Christiansen is a single father working with his parents on the resort they’ve had for years: Evergreen Lake Resort in Minnesota. Darek had been a firefighter, but when his wife died, he worked at the resort to help take care of his son.

He and his wife, Felicity, and friends Jensen and Claire had grown up together in the area. But Jensen was responsible for Felicity’s death. Darek is angry at Jensen, at himself, at God.

Ivy Madison has just moved to the area as the new assistant county attorney. When she bids on Darek for a date at a charity auction, she doesn’t know what to make of his curmudgeonly behavior. But she sees a tender side of him when he’s with his son.

Ivy had grown up in the foster care system, and Darek’s family feels like the one she had always longed for.

But then she has a stunning realization. Before moving here, she had been asked to write a proposed plea deal for a man guilty of vehicular homicide. Since the incident was an accident, she suggested that the man do hours of community service rather than jail time.

After learning Derak’s story, Ivy realizes Jensen is the man whose plea deal she crafted. When Darek learns that Ivy was the one who kept Jensen out of jail, will he forgive her?

Meanwhile, a wildfire rages nearby. Firefighters are on it, but can they keep it from engulfing the town and resort?

Another plot line involves Claire, her unrequited love for Jensen, and her desire to stay in town while her missionary parents want her to go to college at age 25. There’s also a tussle when Claire’s grandfather has an accident. She wants to take care of him; her parents want to move him to a home.

I thought this was the first Susan May Warren book I had read, but I see I had read a few of her Christmas books in past years: Evergreen: A Christiansen Winter Novella (which I just realized involved the family from this book), The Great Christmas Bowl, and Baby, It’s Cold Outside.

The point of view switches back and forth between Darek, Ivy, Jensen, and Claire. One interesting thing about this story is that at first, Darek seems like the innocent wounded party and Jensen seems like the bad guy. But as we learn more of what happened and get to know them better, we see Darek (as well as Felicity) has done things he’s not proud of, and Jensen has good qualities no one appreciates at first.

I thought the faith element was woven in naturally.

Favorite quotes:

I knew your future would take you far from Evergreen Lake. I feared it would take you far, also, from your legacy of faith. Watching your son leave your arms has no comparison to watching him leave God’s. You never seemed to question the beliefs your father and I taught you. Perhaps that is what unsettled me the most. Because without questioning, I wondered how there could be true understanding.

“Small acts of justice can make great ripples in the community.” “Or tear it apart.”

We can’t hold onto something so hard that it destroys everything else we love.

I disagreed with one character saying that God acts almost entirely out of the emotion of love. Love isn’t just an emotion. And I wouldn’t say God acts primarily on emotion.

And I was disappointed Susan spelled out a metaphor that arose with the wildfire and something that was going on in the plot. It was kind of neat to make that connection, and I felt it would have been stronger if the reader had been allowed to make it for herself rather than being told.

But overall I liked getting to know the characters and their situations and where everyone ended up in their journeys. I enjoyed the audiobook narrated by Carol Monda. I didn’t realize that this book was the first of seven involving the Christiansen family. I was able to find several of them for free with Audible’s Plus Catalog,