Tag: book reviews

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Reading While Black

Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope
By Esau McCaulley

📜Summary
Reading While Black is a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation. At a time in which some within the African American community are questioning the place of the Christian faith in the struggle for justice, New Testament scholar McCaulley argues that reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition is invaluable for connecting with a rich faith history and addressing the urgent issues of our times.

He advocates for a model of interpretation that involves an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, in which the particular questions coming out of Black communities are given pride of place and the Bible is given space to respond by affirming, challenging, and, at times, reshaping Black concerns. McCaulley demonstrates this model with studies on how Scripture speaks to topics often overlooked by white interpreters, such as ethnicity, political protest, policing, and slavery.

Ultimately McCaulley calls the church to a dynamic theological engagement with Scripture, in which Christians of diverse backgrounds dialogue with their own social location as well as the cultures of others. Reading While Black moves the conversation forward.

💬My Thoughts
I really appreciated learning from McCaulley’s perspective on a variety of topics, and I was interested in his interpretation of the Biblical passages he used to support his arguments. I did find the book to be quite scholarly, and I don’t feel that I have the background knowledge I would need to evaluate his conclusions without reading more in this area.

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More or Less Maddy

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

More or Less Maddy is the newest release from Lisa Genova, and it centers on Maddy Banks, a young woman with bipolar disorder. Genova does an amazing job in this novel of taking us through Maddy’s experiences with depression and mania that lead to her diagnosis of bipolar, as well as the ups and downs she goes through as she struggles to accept what that diagnosis means for her.

I love that Genova brings a background in neuroscience to her writing. As I read this story, I felt like I was right there with Maddy, feeling the highs and the lows she was dealing with both before she got diagnosed and after, when she was trying to reconcile her need for medication and stability with her desire to pursue her dream of comedy.

I could also empathize with her family and friends, who just wanted her to be okay. Yes, that made them less supportive of her dreams than they could be, but I could understand the desire to see Maddy safe and as healthy as possible.

This was an emotional read and I would highly recommend it.

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The Door-to-Door Bookstore

â­â­â­đŸ’«/5

The Door-to-Door Bookstore is a novel written by German author Carsten Henn and translated by Melody Shaw. It is the story of Carl Christian Kollhoff and how his friendship with a young girl who goes by the name of Schascha changed his life.

I was initially drawn to this book because it is about a bookseller, but I quickly felt connected to Carl and wanted to get to know him better. He has a daily routine that includes delivering books each evening to the customers that have ordered from the bookstore he works at. One evening he is joined by a nine-year old girl named Schascha who has decided she wants to be his friend.

We follow along as Carl and Scascha become friends, get to know his customers better, and deal with Carl losing his beloved job at the bookstore. I found the overall tone of this book to be very melancholy, but I am glad that I read it.

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Mini Book Reviews

Not Quite by the Book by Julie Hatcher

Emma Rini is running her parents’ bookstore and slowly building up resentment against her parents, who seem to take her for granted, and her sister, who is focused on her first pregnancy. When her parents announce they are retiring, she impulsively decides to take a six-week vacation to a crumbling manor house where she can get in touch with her inner Emily Dickinson.

Emma obtains mixed results from her experiment, but learns a lot along the way about herself. Besides the expected love interest, there are new friends to be made and breakthroughs to be had with her family. I enjoyed this book quite a bit and appreciated the bookish themes.

How to Stuff Up Christmas by Rosie Blake

Eve has just discovered her fiance is cheating on her and, after booting him out, is looking for a way to avoid the traditional family Christmas celebrations. She decides to take a pottery course in another town and finds a houseboat rental for her and Marmite, her dog. While there, she encounters the handsome local vet Greg, and they strike up a friendship. 

This book has both humor and heart. There are a lot of catastrophes and chaos, along with some misunderstandings, but eventually everything gets sorted out one way or another. It is a fun, lighthearted read.

Secrets of a Shoe Addict by Beth Harbison

This is the sequel to Shoe Addicts Anonymous and follows a group of friends–Tiffany, Loreen, and Abbey–who get themselves into various kinds of trouble during a school trip to Las Vegas. Tiffany is the sister of Sandra, who is one of the main characters in the first book. When all three ladies need to raise money fast, Sandra helps them out with a side hustle that will do the trick.

I enjoyed seeing these women grow closer throughout the story, as well as how they handled the challenges of their new job and their romantic relationships. It was also nice to see Sandra again and watch her attempts at dating. A quick, fun read.

A Shoe Addict’s Christmas by Beth Harbison

This is an adorable take on a Christmas classic. When Noelle gets locked in the department store she works at on a snowy Christmas Eve, she meets her guardian angel. As they clean up the shoes her angel knocked over as she was coming in, she has the chance to revisit several moments of her life and see how they could have gone if she hadn’t let her fears hold her back. Short and sweet, cute holiday story.

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Found in a Bookshop

Found in a Bookshop by Stephanie Butland

Loveday Cardew’s bookshop has fallen quiet due to the pandemic lockdown. The business is struggling and Loveday and her staff are trying to figure out how to connect with readers in some new way. Out of the blue, they get a letter from a woman named Rosemary, who sends them a check and asks them to pick out some books for her and send one every few days.

This surprising request prompts Loveday to open a book prescription service where people can contact them for book recommendations based on what they need. The customers can share how they are feeling and what they are looking for, and the bookshop staff will pick out some books that can be picked up at the store or mailed or even dropped off to them.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a bit on the longer side, which allowed the time to really get to know Loveday and her staff as well as the stories of several of the customers who requested book prescriptions. There were also a ton of book recommendations with descriptions of why the book was being suggested for the particular person or situation, and all of the recommended books are gathered into a list at the end of the book in case you want to look them up.

There are several reflections on the act of reading scattered throughout the novel, and this is my favorite quote from one of them:

In short: you, dear reader, are correct. You are always correct.

Not only in what you imagine, but in what you feel. You are allowed to not-love the novel the rest of the world is raving about; you are allowed to cordially loathe your sister’s favourite author. Reading is not a test. Whether or not you love a book is not a matter for debate; and not something you can be persuaded into.

Books are the magical everyday that is all your own.

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Young Jane Young

Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin is the story of five women and the scandal that binds them together. The book is divided into five parts, one for each of the women. 

The writing is sharp and funny. I was a little thrown at first by the choose your own adventure device in part five, but enjoyed it once I got used to it. I appreciated the focus on women’s issues, especially the double standard that exists for men and women when it comes to sex.

Love this quote from the author’s note:

Jane’s favorite line is from the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Roughly, it translates, “Humans are not born forever on the day their mothers have them; life necessitates giving birth to themselves over and over again.”

I am a big Zevin fan, and this book definitely delivered!

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Twisted

Twisted by Jonathan Kellerman is the second Petra Connor book and, as far as I can tell, the last. I read the first one, Billy Straight, at the beginning of April and finished this one near the end of the month.

I did like the book, but not as much as the first one. It seemed a bit more glum, for lack of a better word. It seemed like Petra was just going through the motions, both with her job and her relationships, and not really very happy or excited about either of them, which I guess is reality for a fair number of people but isn’t that much fun to read about.

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The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up

The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up by Laura Pearson is a wonderful book which I devoured in one sitting. I loved the process of watching Shelley recover her memories gradually after waking up in the hospital from a coma. By alternating the timeline between then and now, Pearson allows the reader to slowly get more and more of Shelley’s story.

The book does have a focus on generational domestic violence, so it could be hard to read for some people. I do think it was handled very well, but you may want to avoid this book if that is triggering for you. The characters were well developed and the pace was steady.

The only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars is one small plot point at the very end which was totally unrealistic.  I won’t give more details so as to avoid spoilers.  Despite that, I still think this is a great book and plan to read more from this author.

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The Great Sex Rescue

The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended by Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky

Sheila Wray Gregoire’s ministry, Bare Marriage, has been very helpful to me in recovering from some of the messages I learned growing up in conservative evangelical circles.  I was a teenager in the 1980s, so I was a bit early for the full-fledged purity culture movement of the 1990s, but I still heard many harmful teachings about sex and marriage during my dating years and my first marriage.

Note: This book is aimed at straight married people who have received messages from the church or from Christian resources that have caused harm to their marriage. It does not get into sex outside of marriage or LGBT relationships. Despite that, I believe it is a very helpful resource for the intended audience.

There is a lot of research that went into the writing of this book, and it shows. The authors provide a lot of statistics from the large survey that they did as well as discuss their reviews of academic research on evangelicalism and sexuality as well as bestselling Christian sex and marriage books. They also provide anecdotes from their own lives and from (primarily) women who wrote in with their stories.

I only wish this book had been around twenty years earlier. It could have made a big difference for me.

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Lethal Prey

Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers join forces to track down a ruthless killer who will do whatever it takes to keep the past buried, in this latest thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.

Things I loved about this book:

  • How the opening scene with the murder drew me right in
  • The alternating the POV between the investigators and the killer
  • How the killer’s backstory unfolds as the book progresses
  • The introduction of the true-crime bloggers, which makes for a fun addition given the pervasiveness of social media these days
  • That the deductions the investigators make seem plausible given the clues that have been uncovered and aren’t crazy leaps of intuition that don’t ring true
  • The collaboration between two great Sandford characters, Davenport and Flowers
  • The ending, which was a bit different and I really liked

I found Lethal Prey thoroughly entertaining and gave it 5 stars.