Atonement Child

I read Francine Rivers' Atonement Child today. It is about a girl who is a freshman at a Christian College across the country from her childhood home. She is raped and conceives a child. Despite the fact that she is engaged to a future minister, a student at a Christian college and a child of Christians, everyone who is important to her either urges or accepts aborting the child. She however, can never bring herself to go through with the procedure and ends up bringing conversion to an abortionist and healing to her family.

I had mixed feelings about the book. I found it preachy, much more so than I have found most of her other Christian novels. I also found it predictable. On the other hand, I found it troubling, perhaps because I suspect there is truth there. All these God-loving people in her life were pushing her to have an abortion. Her college kicked her out, even though they knew she'd been raped, saying people would think she and her fiance had sinned, unless she was willing to publically state that she'd been raped. I have to wonder sometimes how many women end up in abortion clinics because of what they perceive as lack of support?

Riddle

What do you get when you cross a REAL bodice-buster romance with Christian Fiction? Francine Rivers' Not So Wild a Dream may be the answer. Francine Rivers now writes Christian Fiction and I've read, and reviewed, many of her books. I'd say she's one of the best writers out there writing Christian Fiction. However, in the 1980's she wrote mainstream romance novels, books she has now pulled out of print and warns readers about on her website, making sure everyone knows she wrote them before she became Christian. I've read that Not So Wild a Dream was written after she experienced a religious conversion but before she decided to change genres. This is a story about a young woman who was born to a mentally ill Scottish-American fur trapper and a native American woman. While the man is in town one day Indians raid their home and kill her mother. A few years later her father sells her to a farmer who is looking for a wife. The man is kind and good and reads to her from the Bible. He talks to her about God. She fights the man all the way, wanting to go back to her father, but as he is dying she realizes she loved him too. Next, she becomes involved with a scoundral who teaches her a lot more about sex than she learned from her husband. They end up running a casino and when he leaves her, he left her with it (and it was a money-maker). The last man in the book is similar to the farmer, except that he is a seaman. He wants her, but wants her love, not just her body. Yes, its a love story, and yes, it ends happily. It isn't really Christian fiction since there are plenty of sex scenes and lots of immorality by the "good" characters but the woman's search for God does play a part in her life and how she views these men. I enjoyed the book.

I'm Sure Going to Miss This

I should have had someone take a picture because these days are coming to an end. I don't generally make the little one nap on the weekends. She fights it, we are busy, and, if she really needs one, she lays down and takes one rather than getting cranky and hard to live with. Generally, especially on lazy days like today, she eventually decides to do so. Today I was laying on the couch reading. She came over, pulling her blanket and carrying Shirtie (her security "blanket"--my old nursing pj's) snuggled up beside me with a book, and after I read to her, put her thumb in her mouth and went to sleep. She'll be four in a little over a week and will start school in the fall. My baby is getting big. Pretty soon she'll be too big to hold. She won't want to snuggle with Mom. I'm so thankful I got a second time around with all this joy--but all good things come to an end (and are generally replaced with other good things).

Headed for Bookmooch

I plan to put these on Bookmooch. Email me if you want them.

I recently read two Debbie Macomber books. A Season of Angels is basically the same book as Touched by Angles listed below. Different humans, same angels, happy endings. Susannah's Garden is about a middle-aged woman who returns to her hometown a few months after her father's death to move her mother into an assisted living facility. She had been dreaming about a high school boyfriend for months and while she is there, ends up looking for him. The book has a surprise ending (happy of course) and she makes peace not only with her decesased father but also with her daughter and she realizes how much she loves her husband. She ends up buying a flower shop on Blossom Street in Seattle.

An Echo in the Darkness is book II in her Mark of the Lion series. It is about a Jewish/Christian girl named Hadassa who is thrown to the lions and survives and uses her life to spread the Good News. There is a love story included but it is not at all graphic. The sexual depavity of the Romans is mentioned in and is a part of the book, but there is nothing graphic--no bedroom scenes, and the sinners end up repenting. It took a little longer for me to get into this book than what River's modern-day novels do, but I ended up enjoying it and will look for others in the series.

They Called Her Mrs. Doc is by Janette Oke. It is about the daughter of a Montreal physician who marries a doctor who is determined to return home to the frontier to practice medicine. It is told from the viewpoint of the old woman looking back at her life. It is Christain fiction and a little preachy but an enjoyable read.

Wisconsin by Andrea Boeshaar is a series of three novellas all set in Wisconsin in the present day. They were all love stories, all quite predictable and very preachy.