Review: Scrapping Plans

This is the fourth book in the "Sisters, Ink" series which is about four sisters adopted by a minister and his wife. They are of different races and live in a small Tennessee town. I reviewed book two here.
You can read the first chapter of it here.

Enough about book two. What about this book? Scrapping Plans is about Joy, the sister who was adopted from China. Joy is a Martha Stewart clone and a compulsive organizer and planner. Unfortunately her plans to have a baby haven't worked out. We journey with Joy and her husband through infertility treatment and beyond. As a Catholic I find it interesting that Joy, who is presented as a devout Christian, doesn't have any moral qualms about in-vitro fertilization. I realize that not all Protesants are opposed to it, but I've seen enough to realize that plenty are, and I guess I'm a little surprised that a novel marketed as Chrsitian fiction didn't at least consider the morality of IVF, even if it came to a different conclusion that what the Catholic church does.

We also journey with Joy to China where she goes to see the area in which she was born. Scrapping Plans is also about the girls' father, and his new love (their mom died of cancer a few years ago. Seitz does a good job of bringing out the feelings that even adult children can have when a parent finds a new love.

I've written about series books in my last few reviews and obviously this is a series book as well. I suspect the next book in the series will be about Meg, the first mother among the sisters, because we were told several times in this book that she was suffering from more and more headaches--headaches that had nothing to do with this story.

I've mentioned before that I don't like preachy books. I've also mentioned before that I don't like it when Christian fiction bashes Catholics. Well, I have to say, this book isn't preachy and it doesn't bash Catholics; it bashes Lutherans. Kendra, the sister featured in Coming Unglued wants to get married on an island and the only available church is a Lutheran church. Because her fiance's parents were Lutheran, they were allowed to use the church, but they said about his family that they "devoted their lives to Martin Luther". Somehow I don't think most Lutherans would characterize themselves in that way.

In short, this is a charming story, obviously part of a series of stories, with a couple of faith-based gems, particularly dealing with control of your life, but not so much religion that someone with no faith could not enjoy it.