Tag Archives: contemporary fiction

Review: Good Hope Road

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Good Hope Road by Lisa Wingate

Good Hope Road by Lisa Wingate begins with a tornado hitting the small town of Poetry, Missouri. Twenty-one-year-old Jenilee Lane is home alone, her father and brother having gone to a cattle auction in Kansas City.. Their house is spared, but Jenilee discovers her elderly neighbor, Mrs. Gibson, and the woman’s granddaughter trapped under debris across their storm cellar.

Jenilee and her family had not been close to their neighbors. Jenilee’s father had a bad temper and kept the family to themselves. They were often regarded as “white trash” by the townspeople. But Jenilee is the only help available, so she gets her neighbors out from the cellar just before Mrs. Gibson’s son and daughter-in-law come.

To keep busy, Jenilee and Mrs. Gibson go to the armory, the only large building in town still standing. Along the way, Jenilee picks up pieces of debris she finds: parts of letters, pictures, certificates.

The veterinarian is the only medical help at the armory until a doctor stranded in the storm is brought in. Jenilee had worked for the vet and seems to have a natural way of calming frightened people while they wait for help.

Jenilee continues going to the armory while waiting to hear about her father and brother. One day she decides to tape the paraphernalia she found on a wall there so people can find their lost treasures. This blossoms into giving hope to people.

Mrs. Gibson begins to see there is more to Jenilee than she’d thought. She also runs into an injured man at the armory with whom she’d had a long-running feud. At first she can’t spare a kind word for him. But she sees sides to him that she had forgotten were there.

As neighbors help neighbors and helpers come from others areas, they see each other with fresh vision and discover good things can arise from tragedies.

The book touches on multiple themes: the difficulties of an abusive family; how we can too easily misjudge others; the need to let go of the past; the fact that difficulties can bring out the best and worst in people; and faith, hope, and forgiveness

Some of my favorite quotes:

I walked to the kitchen, shuffling the way I do when my knees are like old plow handles and my joints are rusted shut.

It’s humbling to realize maybe you ain’t as good as someone you’ve spent years looking down on.

That part of you that wants to care for other folks is like fresh milk. You might as well pour it out as you go along the path. It don’t . . . keep in a bucket . . . very long.

In town after town, people were building anew. Towns just like our own—small, imperfect places beneath which hid the potential for something larger, something stronger, something we may never have seen, if not for the disaster.

The book is the second in a series of five, the sequel to Tending Roses (linked to my review). It’s been a few months since I read the first book, but I didn’t see any characters I recognized in this one. In the author’s notes at the end of the book, she explains one distant connection with the first book which will be delved into later.

There were a few “damns” and misuses of the Lord’s name. But otherwise, this was a great book.

Review: Between the Sound and Sea

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Between the Sound and Sea

Between the Sound and Sea is “Inspirational Contemporary Fiction with History and Mystery at a North Carolina Lighthouse.” The Sound in the title is Pamlico Sound in the Outer Banks of NC, but the title has several layers of meaning.

Josephina Harris–Joey–owns a fledgling event-planning business in Copper Creek, TN, where she grew up. She had helped her father and brother in their restoration business until her father retired and sold the business. But the new owner cheated people, who, for some reason, blamed Joey’s father. Her parents decided to make a new start in Florida. Joey’s customers have cancelled events one by one

When Joey’s friend sends her an ad about help wanted to restore a lighthouse and cottage on a North Carolina island, Joey decides to apply. If she gets the job, it will give her an income to tide her over and give her time to think about what she should do next.

Joey travels to NC and meets the owner of the lighthouse, 81-year-old Walt O’Hare, and his grandson, Finn. Walt had grown up in the area but left after WWII. His best friend, Cay, short for Cathy, had been the lighthouse keeper’s daughter. During the war, her father’s body had mysteriously washed up on shore, but Cay was never found and presumed dead. Walt wants to restore the lighthouse in their memory. Finn is not so sure this idea of his grandfather’s is a good one and is even less sure Joey is the person for the job. But he acquiesces.

It soon becomes clear that Walt has other reasons for wanting to restore, reasons which he is not sharing.

The people in town tell of strange things happening on the island over the years. Some say ghosts inhabit the island. Others say Cay’s father was working for the Nazis.

As Joey begins restoration, she finds patched-up places in the lighthouse’s inner walls. When one area begins chipping, she discovers what appears to be a lighthouse keeper’s log inside–but the events described don’t match the official logs.

Local lore describes a “Saint Mae” who rescued people lost at sea. Could these logs belong to Mae? But who is she and why is she not listed among the lighthouse keepers?

When accidents and unexplained things start happening around the lighthouse and cottage, Joey wonders what’s at the bottom of it all.

Besides the lighthouse mystery, Joey, Walt, and Finn all deal with regrets from their past and indecision about how to handle the future. There’s a secondary story line involving a teenage boy with a troubled past.

I enjoyed how the story unfolded, sharing what really happened with Cay, who Mae was, how everything connected, and how each character found peace. The restoration of the lighthouse seemed a subtle metaphor for the needed restoration available to each character.

I also loved that the author had Christian characters doing Christian things without being heavy-handed about it. Some Christian fiction is so subtle, there’s almost nothing Christian about it. It’s refreshing to find truly Christian fiction.

A couple of favorite quotes:

God meets us right where we’re at. And maybe things in our lives get broken down and beat up along the way. The good news is restoration work is kind of His specialty.

I’m grateful to have played a role, but I wasn’t the planner orchestrating this event.
This one was in the hands of One far more skilled than I, gently guiding even when we were all half certain we’d lost our way.

A couple of well-worded descriptions caught my ear, too: “the comfort of an oversized sweater worn on a crisp fall morning” and “Her voice was wispy like fog over water.”

I listened to the audiobook read by Rebecca Quinn Robertson, who did an okay job. She spoke too softly sometimes.

As I sat down to write this review, I looked up the book on Amazon and reread the first few pages in their free sample. I had forgotten how it began, with an older woman telling a young boy about Saint Mae. I was delighted to realize who those characters were later in the story.

Overall, this was a great read that I am happy to recommend.

Review: Firefly Cove

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Firefly Cove is the second in Davis Bunn’s Miramar Bay series.

Lucius Quarterfield lived in the 1960s and developed pleurisy when he was seven. The illness damaged his heart to the point that doctors did not give him long to live.

Though often weak and in pain, when Lucius was grown, he bought a small automobile dealership, which eventually turned into a chain.

He fell in love with a woman named Jessica, who was opposite from him in almost every way. However, since he knew he would die young, he felt it was best to pull away, to spare Jessica the pain of losing him.

After eleven months, he wants to see her and drives back to Miramar. His worst fears are realized when he has a heart attack and dies in her arms.

But then he wakes up in a cold room with a sheet over his face. People call him Luke, not Lucius. His hands and face are not his own. He discovers the date is almost fifty years ahead of his own time.

Nothing in the book’s descriptions said anything about this, and the other books in the series that I have read so far don’t have any kind of supernatural or science fiction elements. So it was jarring. Maybe the author wanted it to be as disorienting to the reader as it would have been to the character.

I don’t believe in reincarnation because Hebrews 9:27 says, “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” There’s also nothing in Scripture about any human inhabiting any other human’s body. From what I have read of the author, I think he believes the same way. So I am not sure why he would have this occur in his story.

I decided to view the situation as a plot device, just like other impossibilities such as time travel.

In Lucius’s situation, the young man whose body he woke up in had just attempted his third try at suicide. His therapist’s supervisor is ready to have him locked up. He would be even more ready if Lucius told him he had actually lived fifty years before. All Lucius wants to do is find out what happened to Jessica.

Luke’s therapist, a Persian young woman named Asha, notices several differences about him right away. He looks the same but carries himself differently, speaks differently, and has even lost his French-Canadian accent. She and her supervisor think Luke’s “near death experience” led to Dissociative Identity Disorder, or a split personality. Yet he doesn’t manifest certain hallmarks of that illness.

At it’s heart, this book is a love story, though an unconventional one. The story was well-written. We’re drawn in as Lucius’s situation slowly unfolds, figuring out modern gadgets and ways, what kind of man Luke was, how he should proceed, what his future should look like. The characters were well-developed–besides Lucius, I particularly liked Asha and her grandmother. The intrigue of what’s going to happen to Luke–will he ever find Jessica, what will he do when he does, will he be able to avoid being committed to an institution, will anyone else ever believe his story–keeps us engaged, as does Asha’s story. I’m still processing what I think about the book. Even though I normally wouldn’t care for this kind of story, I found it engaging.

I’m inclined to think this might have worked better as a stand-alone novel, except that the theme of the Miramar Bay books has to do with second chances.

(Sharing with Bookish Bliss Quarterly Link-Up)

Review: Miramar Bay

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Miramar Bay by Davis Bunn

When I started listening to The Christmas Hummingbird by Davis Bunn, I didn’t realize that it was the eighth novel in a series. The first few books in the series were free for Audible subscribers, so I decided to try them out.

In the first novel, Miramar Bay, Connor Larkin is an actor known for his “bad boy” good looks and for dying onscreen (97 times so far). His current gig is a fake “reality” show featuring his relationship with a Hollywood starlet. But now the studio has written an on-air wedding into the script, and Connor bolts. He had visited Miramar, on California’s central coastline, some years before, and it seemed a quiet place to hide out and think.

Connor steps into a Miramar restaurant playing Sinatra music and is drawn in. He had originally wanted to be a musician playing this type of music, but his early acting roles led him another direction. He finds himself applying for a waiter’s job at the restaurant.

Sylvie Cassick had put all her money and hopes into the restaurant and named it Castaways. Her father had been an artist, a kind man but an impractical dreamer. When her mother left them, Sylvie took on the role of trying to keep things in order and the bills paid. She had not heard from her mother in years, and her father passed away, so she’s on her own. Her staff has become dear friends. But everything hangs by a thread: one major problem or repair could cost her everything.

And then the unthinkable happens when illegal drugs are found in her fish order.

As Conner and Sylvie get to know each other, they bond over music. But when Sylvie learns who Connor really is, she can’t get over the fact that he lied to her.

Miramar is known as a place of second chances. Will Connor and Sylvie find theirs as they each face their separate crises?

Some of the characters in the later book were here, too: the sheriff, the head waitress, and a few others.

I looked online to see if Miramar is a real place, and it is: you can read more here.

I loved the small-town, close-knit community Bunn created. The characters seemed real and relatable. The plot kept me invested and interested.

As with the Christmas book, there’s not much mention of anything of a spiritual nature in this book, though everything else I’ve read from Bunn has been Christian fiction. One character visits a chapel a couple of times and prays for help. Perhaps Bunn meant this as a crossover into the general market, which would then draw readers back to his many other books. This is a good, clean read, but it was a little sad to me that the author, who knows real peace can only be found in Christ, had Connor find his peace in a community.

The only other thing some readers might find objectionable is a fair amount of alcohol consumption. One example: Sylvie’s friends “make” her drink brandy to brace herself before sharing bad news. I know this is an area where good people can differ, but to me alcohol seemed to be mentioned a lot.

I listened to the audiobook nicely read by Graham Winton. If you’re familiar with the Adventures in Odyssey radio program by Focus on the Family, Graham’s voice sounds a lot like the actor who portrays character Jason Whitaker there–so much so, that I had to look up that actor. But that actor’s name is Townsend Coleman.

(Sharing with Bookish Bliss Quarterly Link-Up)

Review: Tending Roses

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In Tending Roses by Lisa Wingate, Kate Bowman drives with her husband and baby son to her grandmother’s Missouri farm a few weeks before Christmas. But this will be no idyllic holiday season.

Kate’s grandmother “had a talent for stirring up unpleasantness, she was an expert on every subject, and she felt the need to control everyone” (p. 16). She acted like a martyr when she didn’t get her way. She was so fussy about her house, Kate often felt she loved it more than her.

Kate’s grandmother has become forgetful and nearly burned the farmhouse down. Kate’s father and aunt are coming for Christmas and planning to move Grandma Rose into a nursing home.

All the family has not been together and has rarely spoken to each other since Kate’s mother died.

So this holiday family reunion has all the makings of a potential war.

Kate and her husband have been elected to go to the farm early, under the guise of an extended visit, to help keep an eye on Grandma and prevent any other fires or disasters til the rest of the family comes. Kare is still on maternity leave due to her son’s heart condition, and her husband works remotely, so they are the perfect candidates.

But worries over the baby’s health, the piles of medical bills, and her assistant taking over her job have Kare distracted.

At first the visit goes about as well as Kate expected. But one day she finds her grandmother’s journal and discovers the hopes, dreams, and trials she experienced as a younger woman. That and getting to know her on an everyday level have Kate questioning her own future as well as the family’s decision about Grandma’s.

There’s naturally a lot of tension at first in the book with all the personality clashes and problems. But I loved the story arc and the slow understanding that developed between Kate and her grandmother.

A secondary story line involves Dell, an impoverished child living nearby in a shack with her ailing grandmother. “Poverty and ignorance were characters we saw on TV, or sometimes passed on the highway while traveling to some vacation hideaway. They were not our neighbors. They did not have faces with soft brown eyes and down-turned mouths that never smiled” (p. 83).

A few sentences that stood out to me:

I felt a little like a wishbone in a tug-of-war (p. 146).

Grandma sensed World War III coming on and stepped in like Switzerland (p. 175).

That’s the problem with people. We’ll starve to death looking over the fence when we’re knee-deep in grass where we are (p. 206).

Years have mellowed my joy in Christmas, as in all things. The packages, the tree, the fire, all carry memories to me—reminders that I am the last. Looking at them, I relive, remember, and regret. And an ache blossoms in my breast that I am no longer young (p. 232).

This had been the hardest year of my life, when all the colors ran outside the lines I had drawn, but also the year when I finally discovered myself (pp. 272-273).

This story is more than a reminder to “stop and smell the roses.” It weaves together themes of family, forgiveness, faith, materialism versus contentment, aging, caring for each other, especially the elderly.

This book is the first in a series of five. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

Review: A Month of Summer

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In Lisa Wingate’s novel, A Month of Summer, Rebecca Macklin lives in LA, has a legal practice with her husband, and runs her 9-year-old gymnast daughter to practices and meets.

Then Rebecca receives a devastating phone call. She has not seen her father in over thirty years. She was supposed to spend a month of every summer with him and his new family as part of the custody arrangement of her parents’ divorce when she was twelve. But she refused to go. Her father honored her wishes.

Her stepmother has written over the last couple of years that Rebecca’s father developed dementia and urged her to make peace before it was too late. But Rebecca ignored her. Why bother making contact with him now?

But a phone call from Dallas puts Rebecca in a tough spot. Her step-mother has had a stroke. Her developmentally disabled step-brother was roaming town alone, having gotten on a bus without being able to figure out how to find his way home. Her father was totally confused. The police found Rebecca’s name on a contact list. If she didn’t come to take care of her father and step-brother, Social Services was going to get involved.

Reluctantly, Rebecca makes plans to go. But on the day she leaves, she sees her husband at an outdoor cafe holding hands with one of his clients. Is this why he has been working late? Without time to confront him, she boards her flight, with all the problems of her life weighing her down.

But when she arrives in Dallas, things are worse than she imagined. A housekeeper who was supposed to keep things in order has disappeared. Dirty dishes and molded food are everywhere as is dirty laundry. Wet laundry has mildewed in the washer. And money is missing from her father’s accounts.

The point of view shifts back and forth from Rebecca and her step-mother, Hanna Beth. Hanna Beth is cognizant, but can’t express herself or control her movements. When she learns that Rebecca has come, now of all times, she wonders what will happen. Will Rebecca ship her father and step-brother off to institutions before Hanna Beth can recover enough to go back home?

As each woman painfully peels back layers of the last several years, they learn things aren’t always as they appear.

I saw one reviewer call this a light and easy read. I didn’t think so, myself. It was a good read, but felt very heavy sometimes, except for the knowledge (or at least the hope) that things would work out somehow in the end.

There’s a delightful cast of side characters in the book: a sweet older woman Rebecca meets on the flight who she runs into again later, a talkative older man in Hanna Beth’s nursing center, a stern German physical therapist, a sweet aide with two boys, a nurse from Ghana. I loved one teasing line from the nurse who was trying to get the older man back to his room: “Old rooster, he loud on the fence, quiet in the stew.”

This book is the first in Lisa’s Blue Sky Hill series about a neighborhood in Dallas. I had read the second book in the series, The Summer Kitchen, as well as the fourth, Dandelion Summer. But there were so many years between each read, I could not remember if any of these characters showed up in the later books. I probably would have caught more of the connections if I had read them in order and closer together, but each book does hold up well as a stand-alone.

Review: Now and Then and Always

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Now and Then and Always

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

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Whose Waves These Are by Amanda Dykes

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

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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.