Tag Archives: Christian fiction

Review: You’re the One that I Want

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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

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The Wonder of You by Susan May Warren

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

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Always On My Mind by Susan May Warren

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

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A Noble Scheme by Roseanna M. White

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

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When I Fall in Love by Susan May Warren

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

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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

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Dandelion Summer by Lisa Wingate

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

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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,

Review: Dear Henry, Love Edith

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Dear Henry, Love Edith

In Becca Kinzer’s debut rom-com novel,. Dear Henry, Love Edith, Edith Sherman is ready to make a new start. Her marriage was difficult and about to end when her husband became ill and passed away. She stayed with him til the end, and they reconciled. But the problems there and in her relationship with her parents has soured her on marrying again. She had given up her hopes and dreams of traveling the world, and now is the time to pick them up again. She plans to go to South Africa to help in a mission there as soon as her passport arrives.

In the meantime, she heard from a friend that a crisis nursery in the small town of Westshire, IL could use her nursing skills for the summer. She had planned to stay in the house of a friend of a friend, Kat, who would be away during that time. But Kat sent her a note that a pipe had burst in her house. However, her uncle Henry had an upstairs he wasn’t using and would be glad to have her stay there until the damage was repaired.

Henry actually wasn’t glad. But since he was recovering from a knee injury and couldn’t use the upstairs, he reluctantly agreed that what he assumed was an older widowed missionary lady could stay there.

Edith, on her part, assumed that the uncle of someone her age would be an older bachelor. She didn’t realize that Kat and her uncle were just a few years apart.

For several weeks, living in different parts of the house and working different times, Edith and Henry didn’t meet and left notes for each other. Each assuming the other was older, their notes became more friendly and confidential.

Meanwhile, Henry can’t help but notice a beautiful brown-eyed blond in town. They run into each other several times without getting each other’s names. Then Henry realizes this is the Edith living upstairs in his house.

Edith notices Henry, too, and it’s only a matter of time before they find each other out and admit their attraction. But Edith remains firm about not marrying. And besides, she’s leaving the country soon.

I don’t usually read romantic comedies, but I saw good reviews for this one. When it was on sale for the Kindle and then free for Audible, I decided to try it. There were a lot of funny and cute moments, and the overall story was sweet. I enjoyed a lot of the banter. The “comedy of errors”—misunderstandings or things going wrong that escalate— is not my favorite type of humor. Nothing wrong with it, I just find it tiresome and not funny. I preferred the more serious parts. Even though this was meant to be a funny story, there was a lot of depth to it.

Though this was a Christian novel, at first I didn’t see much Christian about it besides an occasional mention of church or prayer. But later on, as the two main characters wrestle with their various issues, they pray and seek God more earnestly.

Unfortunately, there was one reference I was dismayed to see in a Christian novel. It wasn’t obvious, though, so I think some might overlook it.

If you like romantic comedies, you might like this book.

Review: The Winter Rose

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The Winter Rose by Melanie Dobson is a dual-timeline novel.

Grace Tonquin is an American Quaker woman living in Vichy France during WWII. She had left behind the lifestyle of her actress mother, Ruby. Now she works with a network of others to help Jewish children escape France over the Pyrénées mountains into Spain. Grace has been told by Roland, her friend and leader, this must be her last group. Previously she had gotten the children to those who would take them over the mountains; now she must go with them. It was no longer safe for her to remain in France.

One boy, Louis, ends up having to remain behind in hiding with Helene, a woman who worked with Grace. Grace takes the remaining eleven children through various dangers until they finally arrive in Spain.

Most of the children are sent to live with relatives. Grace takes two of the children, siblings Elias and Marguerite, home with her to Oregon. She and Roland marry, and they raise the children as their own.

In 2003, Addie Hoult comes to Tonquin Lake in OR to look for any remnants of the Tonquin family. Her mentor and father-figure, Charlie Tonquin, is desperately ill and needs a transplant preferably from someone related. Charlie has always steadfastly refused to share anything about his family or his past. But Addie is determined to try to find his relatives, hopefully even his long lost sister.

I had seen films about people who helped Jewish children escape over the mountains. However, those movies ended with the children getting safely over, where it was assumed they lived happy and stable lives afterward. This book deals with the aftermath some of them faced. Even getting to safety, many of them couldn’t help but be traumatized by having to leave their homes and families, travel in difficult conditions, and witness things children should not have to see.

Some of the quotes I liked best:

She didn’t understand, nor would she ever, why God didn’t rescue everyone in this life, but it was her job, her grandfather had often reminded her, to be faithful in caring for those God gave to her (p. 37, Kindle version).

No one wants to hold you against your will. We want you to master your will so you can be in control of yourself (p. 189).

Living, I think, defies the loss. Loving well defies it, too (p. 301).

I enjoyed Melanie’s notes at the end where she told some of the history the novel was based on as well as what was fictional. She included some of that information on her website here.

When I’ve shared Melanie’s books before, some have wondered if she was related to or connected with the Dobsons of Focus on the Family. The “About the Author” page at the back of the book says, in part, “Melanie is the previous corporate publicity manager at Focus on the Family, owner of the publicity firm Dobson Media Group, and a former adjunct professor at George Fox University.” Since her husband’s last name is Dobson and she worked at Focus, I assume he is related somehow–unless the same last name is just a coincidence.

Overall, I thought this was a good book. I got a little lost in some places, unusual for Melanie’s books. But I appreciated getting to know “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey wold have said, behind some of the displaced children of WWII and the people who helped them. However, they aren’t the only ones in the story dealing with past wounds and needing to heal from their experiences. That seems to be the common theme among many of the characters.