I read John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars a couple years ago. (Another author I got to know through Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing. Even if you have never attended, the booklist on their site is a great place to pick up recommendations.) I haven’t yet gotten to the theatre to see the movie everyone is talking about (Christianity Today gives it a 3-star out of 4 review), but I thought you might be interested in what I wrote about the book in 2012:
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I picked up My Brother Sam is Dead because it is a Newbery Honor book and available from my library as an audio book. Tim and Sam’s father is Tory in this tale of the American Revolution. He just wants to be allowed to live his life and continue his business of running a tavern in Reading, Connecticut. He wants his sons to stay out of the rebellion, so we get more than the traditional American of-course-the-revolution-was-a-good-thing viewpoint. Neither the Tories nor Patriots are “the good guys” in this book; the war itself, with its indiscriminate killing and abuses of power, is the ultimate bad guy. The injustice of the ending (Sam is dead) left me incensed and must surely anger young readers. The author asks the question if the goal of freedom and rule by the people could have been accomplished without bloodshed. Studying pharmacy was supposed to be Ann Brown’s ticket to lots of money and living the good life—not to a remote mission hospital on the continent she swore never to even visit. But God had other plans. From a dysfunctional home in Australia to a youthful lark in London to life in politically torn South Africa, Ann takes us along on her journey of transformation. We meet the people she grew to love despite her racist beginnings. We see her stumble and sometimes fall, only to recommit her way to the God who invites people of all cultures into his family. You will laugh with her and feel her anger as she faces challenges from a house full of cockroaches to angry whites who want to eject her and a group of African orphans from the beach. This morning I reviewed the book A Muslim and a Christian in Dialogue by Badru D. Kateregga and David W. Shenk on Amazon. (Click the link and scroll down to read the review.) The authors are friends, academic colleagues and team-teachers of a comparative religions course at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya. I posted my thoughts on Amazon. My review was approved and went live. I started to post a link to a Muslim friend I had thought of frequently as I read. Suddenly some of the things I had said felt harsh. I hadn’t said them in the way I would have said them face-to-face with my friend. I've had a great time this past year working with Rob Skead on several YA manuscripts. (Not this one.) When he came up with this great idea for using his new digital picture book to raise funds for Feed America, I had to let you know. Here's what Rob has to say about his new book: I want to give a big thank you to LeAnne for inviting me to be her guest blogger. She is one of the “things” I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving. If it were not for her editing and mentoring skills I would not have sold a story to Zondervan this year. What a blessing! So have you read your copy of Honddu Vale yet? How about writing a book review? Remember when you were a kid and had to stand in front of the class and give and oral book report, and you started at the beginning and told the story until your teacher said, “Okay, that’s enough. You can sit down now”? Well, it’s not like that. (Although if you want to do a video review, go for it. You can post it on Amazon.com.) What does go into an effective book review? This self-publishing thing is quite a challenge. Although Glastonbury Tor was a finalist for a major award, it was not a big seller, and my publisher was not interested in a sequel. After shopping the manuscript for Honddu Vale around, an agent advised me to self-publish. She loved my writing, but my diversity of interests would not appeal to commercial publishers. So here I am—my own editor, book designer, and marketer. I’ve had lots of help. My critique group offered plenty of suggestions along the way. My daughter is a fabulous proofreader, catching commas and hyphens and even, “Mom, this word doesn’t work. It wasn’t used until the nineteenth century.” (I’m writing about the sixteenth.)
The summer of 1976 my husband and I arrived in Ethiopia to teach at the Good Shepherd School for missionary children. Not only was that year the two hundredth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence; it was also a time of major political upheaval in Ethiopia. Emperor Haile Selassie had been deposed in 1974. The new government was a militaristic version of Marxism ruled by “the Derg,” or committee. Three coups occurred the year we were there. The last brought Lt. Col. Mongistu Haile Mariam to sole power. His government patterned itself after early Chinese Communism. Sharon Souza's Unraveled starts slowly (way too much background in chapter one and a bit too much general niceness in the early chapters), but wow! when it gets going! Sharon describes her writing as “heart-of-the-matter fiction with a good dose of humor.” The humor in this case comes from the quirky voice of Aria Winters granddaughter of former-hippies-turned-Jesus-people krystal and blue karma. Ree, as she is called, grew up on the nut farm (walnuts, almonds, and pistachios, that is), and runs off to Moldova (check your map of Eastern Europe) to be a missionary. |
AuthorLeAnne Hardy has lived in six countries on four continents. Her books come out of her cross-cultural experiences and her passion to use story to convey spiritual truths in a form that will permeate lives. Add http://www.leannehardy.net/1/feed to your RSS feed.
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