Tag: book reviews

Posted on

Followers Under 40

Followers Under 40: The journey away from church for Millenials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha by Rachel Gilmore and Kris Sledge

The church has a problem. We are aging, clergy are aging, and churches are in decline. So, what do we do? How do we reach younger generations? In Followers Under 40, Rachel Gilmore and Kris Sledge take a closer look at the defining qualities and characteristics of Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha while also exploring why they are leaving the church and what steps any congregation can take to begin reaching young adults today.

One thing I appreciate about this book is that the authors have both been involved in church plants aimed at growing diverse communities that include young adults and young families. Full disclosure, Kris Sledge has been my pastor for the past year and a half, and this has been a time of great personal growth for me.

The sections discussing the experiences and concerns of the younger generations are compelling and thought-provoking. As a Gen Xer myself, I can relate to some of it by recalling my own young adulthood, but there are definitely issues that are different and more complex due to the societal and technological changes that have occurred since then.

Gilmore and Sledge also spend several chapters offering suggestions as to how our churches can connect better with people under 40.  They share many great ideas, and I especially like how they give practical examples of how to implement each of them along with anecdotes of how they have used some of these strategies.

This sentence from the closing chapter seems to sum up the call to action:

We are invited to lead and embody a church that can evolve and adapt to become a place of deep hope, healing, and transformation for the new and emerging generations.

May that be a challenge we all accept!

Posted on

What I’m Reading – February 2025

What I’m Reading Now

Right now, I am reading The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby. I am only a couple of chapters in and am already finding it intense.

What I Recently Finished

Fiction

  • The Seaside Sisters by Pamela Kelley – Another delightful read from this author. I enjoy her books a lot and only wish they were longer. 4 stars
  • The Avalon Ladies Scrapbooking Society by Darien Gee – Heartwarming story but sure has a lot of characters to keep track of. 3 stars
  • The Hygge Holiday by Rosie Blake – My first from her but won’t be my last! 4 stars. Full review here.
  • Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo – I have mixed feelings about this book. I appreciated the mystical aspect of the women having different gifts and the anthropological approach being applied to a family history, but I found it hard to keep everyone straight in my head. I also wasn’t a fan of the many mentions of bodily functions. I think it’s just a case of it not being the best fit for me. 3 stars
  • The Taste of Ginger by Mansi Shah – 5 stars. Full review coming soon.
  • Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – 4 stars. Full review coming soon.
  • Winter Stroll, Winter Storms, and Winter Solstice by Elin Hilderbrand – I read the first book in this series several years ago and decided to read the rest this month. Pretty good, 3 stars.

Nonfiction

  • Followers Under 40: The journey away from church for Millenials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha by Rachel Gilmore and Kris Sledge – 5 stars. Full review coming soon.

What I Added to my TBR

I was shocked to realize when I looked at my Goodreads that I added over 40 books to my TBR last month! Most were fiction, but I did add one memoir and one other nonfiction book as well.

TBR Stats

  • I currently have 156 books on my TBR.
  • Of those, 20 are nonfiction and 136 are fiction.
  • I have not finished any of my 25 in 2025 challenge yet.

If you’re on Goodreads, feel free to add me as a friend. I’m always looking for new recommendations!

Posted on

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

Being a big fan of Jane Austen and always willing to give an adaptation of her work a try, I was excited to come across The Rajes series by Sonali Dev.  There are currently four books in the series, which conveniently cover the four Austen books I am most fond of.  I was able to get the first one from the library recently and read it over the last week of last year.  I have to say this was one of the best adaptations of Pride and Prejudice I have ever read.

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors tells the story of Dr. Trisha Raje, a San Francisco neurosurgeon from a successful Indian American family.  She is at the top of her game professionally but has had a strained relationship with certain members of her family following something that happened while she was in college.  At a dinner for her brother, who has political aspirations, she meets DJ Caine, an up-and-coming chef who has left a position at a top restaurant to help his sister Emma, who is in San Francisco for surgery with none other than Dr. Raje.

Their first meeting does not go well, of course.  The rest of the book is a masterful exposition of how their relationship develops, despite their continued clashes and misunderstandings, against the backdrop of high-stakes medicine and sumptuous food.  We also get an intimate view of the dynamics in both families.

I enjoyed this book greatly and am looking forward to the next one in the series, Recipe for Persuasion.

Posted on

Ranking Jane Austen

This may be a controversial post, but this is how I would rank Jane Austen’s novels.

  1. Persuasion – While Pride and Prejudice is many readers’ favorite book and I do love it, I love Persuasion even more. Something about Anne Elliot’s relatable character and her second-chance romance with Frederick Wentworth just resonates with my soul.
  2. Pride and Prejudice – There is so much to love about this book. It is just a wonderful story all around; it is witty and timeless and has such amazing characters. I mean, who wouldn’t love Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy?
  3. Sense and Sensibility – I love the juxtaposition of Elinor and Marianne’s personalities, as well as the ups and downs of their romantic lives.
  4. Emma – I don’t relate as well to Emma as to the main characters in the top three books, but I do appreciate this novel and Emma’s journey to becoming more self-aware and grown-up.
  5. Mansfield Park – I don’t have any specific reasons for putting this in fifth place.  It just didn’t draw me in and make me care about the characters very much.
  6. Northanger Abbey – Perhaps I need to re-read this one, as I don’t remember much about it other than I didn’t enjoy it.

Do you agree or would you rank them differently?

Posted on

The Hygge Holiday

I love the concept of hygge, which is a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture). I was first introduced to it by a creator I used to follow on YouTube and loved the idea.  I incorporate touches of it into my life wherever I can.

In The Hygge Holiday by Rosie Blake, we meet Clara, a young Danish woman who has just arrived in the small village of Yulethorpe. She is intrigued by the town and arranges to house and pet sit for Louisa, who has decided to close her toy shop and jaunt off to warmer climes. As Clara wields her hygge magic on Louisa’s flat and shop, she slowly becomes a part of the local community. 

Not everyone is happy she is there, however.  Louisa’s son Joe is suspicious of her motives and starts coming down from the big city to check on her.  And Roz, a local who is contemptuous of both Louisa and Clara, makes her objections known very loudly.

I found this book charming.  I liked the dual POV with Clara and Joe, which is interspersed with the emails Louisa is sending to Gavin, the owner of the local pub.  I also appreciated how relatable all of the characters were (well, maybe except for Roz, who is completely unlikable). There is some humor (can you say unfiltered parrot), some romance, and a lot of the promised hygge.

This is the first novel I have read by Rosie Blake, but it certainly won’t be the last!

Posted on

The Book Swap

I love books about books, and The Book Swap by Tessa Bickers more than delivers on that front. After quitting her job, Erin Connolly decides she needs a fresh start and begins by decluttering her bedroom. Unfortunately, one of the items she accidentally gets rid of is her heavily annotated copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, when she drops off a bunch of books at a local community library. But then the book turns up back in the library a week later with new notes in the margins and an invitation to meet her new friend in Great Expectations.

Thus begins a conversation between Erin and her Mystery Man. As they share their favorite novels with each other, their friendship deepens and leads them both to hope for something more. Unbeknownst to them, however, they already know each other in real life, and their history is not good.

I enjoyed the juxtaposition between the relationship that develops through the book exchanges and the conflict that arises whenever the two meet in real life.  The POV switches back and forth between Erin and James throughout the book, so we are privy to both sides as the story unfolds as to what happened in their past.  Bickers does a great job with the second chance storyline, but the book encompasses a lot more than that as it also deals with grief, family relationships, and coming into your own as an adult.

There were a lot of great classic works highlighted in this book, and I was especially intrigued by the book the main characters had shared an interest in when they were in school together, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.  Somehow, I have never read it, and I am hoping to get to it this year.

All in all, I can’t recommend this book enough.

Posted on

The Reading List

The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams is a debut novel that ticks a lot of boxes for me, most especially that it centers around the power of books to affect our lives. The two main characters are the Widower Mukesh and Aleisha Thomas.  Aleisha is a teenager working a summer job in the local library when Mukesh comes in to try to find something to read.  Neither of them is much of a reader at the start of the book, but then Aleisha finds a list of book recommendations and decides to start reading them and also to suggest the first book on the list to Mukesh.

As both of them embark on a reading journey, they also develop an improbable friendship which slowly deepens as time progresses.  Each of them has challenges in their families, as Mukesh navigates life after the death of his wife and Aleisha juggles her need to become her own individual with the needs of her mother and brother.  The lessons they learn from the books on the list help them find ways to handle their personal struggles and develop in new ways.

I loved how Adams weaves the books they are reading around the events happening in their lives in a compelling way. This story also shows us the power of community and how that can happen in a place like the library.

Highly recommended!

Posted on

Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

In this 2015 memoir, the late Rachel Held Evans shared her journey with church – how she got to the point of leaving the church she had loved and how she struggled with where she belonged after that.  The book is structured around the seven sacraments of the Catholic church: Baptism, Confession, Holy Orders, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Marriage. Each section has several chapters where her personal story is woven in with a discussion of the theme.

I really appreciated how Evans shared both the positive and the negative of her experience with church.  She did not paint the conservative church she grew up in as all bad by any means, but she also didn’t shy away from the problems she came to have with some of the beliefs and behaviors she encountered.

After spending some time away from church entirely, she found herself longing for community and began searching for a church where she could experience that alongside people who were also willing to question and examine what they believed.  This quote seems to sum up what she was looking for:

Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable.  Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth.  We might just create sanctuary.

I can relate to her struggle with finding yourself in a place that does not align with your beliefs, but then feeling a sense of loneliness and disconnection when no longer inhabiting that space.  I am thankful that I have been able to find a community of faith that allows me to be myself while also challenging me to grow even more.

Posted on

6 Memoirs to Check Out

I don’t read a lot of memoirs, so these go back quite a few years, but I highly recommend all of them.

House Lessons: Renovating a Life by Erica Bauermeister – I have greatly enjoyed her novels and equally loved this memoir of her time renovating a house and starting her writing career.  Both topics were equally fascinating.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb – I finished this in one day, it was so good!  She shares about her experiences with therapy, both as a therapist and as a client, and it was captivating.

I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag: A Memoir of a Life Through Events – the Ones You Plan and the Ones You Don’t by Jennifer Gilbert – While Jennifer’s story centers around a painful experience, her writing is filled with the determination and hopefulness that she has fought to recover in her life. In addition to her insights about her personal journey and close relationships, we also see how she brings the lessons she has learned to her professional life as an event planner.

Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber – A journey from agnosticism to Christianity. The story takes place over the course of a year and is set against the backdrop of time spent in graduate study at Oxford University in England, far from her home in Canada.  Highly recommend the book as well as the movie that followed.

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Riechl – So well written and such an intriguing account of how a food critic lives.  I loved hearing about the food she encountered but also the disguises she created in order to get regular treatment when she went out to eat for a review.

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of the Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure – I found this memoir to be extremely enjoyable and fascinating. I greatly appreciated the writing style as much as the content and laughed out loud at least a dozen times during the course of the book. I would definitely recommend this book to any and all Little House book fans.

Do you read memoirs? Are there any you recommend?

Posted on

The Little Italian Hotel

The Little Italian Hotel by Phaedra Patrick is a charming take on what to do when faced with sudden divorce.  When Ginny Splinter’s husband tells her he wants a divorce, she impulsively invites four of her radio show listeners to join her on a trip to Italy that was originally planned as a trip for her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.  Each of her fellow travelers is facing their own heartbreak, which we learn more about as the novel unfolds.

The group meets up in a quaint hotel called Splendido and gets to know the owner and his daughter while they enjoy the beautiful surroundings.  They take several day trips to scenic and historical spots around Italy as well as engage in various activities suggested by each of the members.  As they begin to share their stories with each other, they form friendships and offer each other support and understanding that helps them start to move forward through their grief.

I thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions of the Italian culture and countryside, and I appreciated how much Ginny grew in her understanding of her marriage and herself throughout the trip.  The ending was especially good, in my opinion, but I won’t say more than that because of spoilers!