Jeanette Windle’s books just keep getting better. I reviewed her Afghanistan series in the past. Her latest, Congo Dawn, is being released this week. It's set in the former Belgian Congo, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” Whether that darkness is local or colonial, Conrad leaves in doubt, and Windle picks up this theme in a thriller that will keep you up at night turning pages. The author knows Africa from the relief organizations and schools where my kids studied to the stamping of pestles and the singing of the locals. She shows African believers putting us Westerners to shame with their faith in the midst of a horrific situation. The book may be fiction, but the situation of brutal warlords and corrupt corporations grabbing what they can get at the expense of ordinary people is all too real.
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I saw two movies this Christmas season--The Hobbit and Les Miserables. I had mixed feelings about The Hobbit Peter Jackson seems to have lost sight of the fact that the extreme success of Lord of the Rings was at least in part due to the care he took to be faithful to the original books. We all knew The Hobbit would give more emphasis to the One Ring since Tolkien himself didn’t know its importance when he wrote the book before he ever thought of its sequels. This week is my big Crossovers Blog Tour! The book is available on Kindle. The teaser is up on YouTube. Print copies were sent to reviewers, and this week several will post their comments. I hope you will check them out and encourage the bloggers (and me!) with your comments. The $0.99 Kindle price will only last through this week, so tell your friends. You don't need to own a Kindle to read the e-book. A free app is available for your computer or your phone, which is where I read most of my e-books. Print copies, signed by the author, are also available from me. I am partial to audio books. They allow me to read while driving or doing a boring job. I can even read with my eyes closed at night. One of the books I “read” this summer was The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I know, you probably read it a couple years ago, or at least saw the movie, but somehow I missed even that. When I finally got around to it, I didn’t want the book to end. Some in the African-American community take exception to it—historical liberties, stereotypes and why is it only the blacks who speak with dialect? (Dialect didn’t bother this northerner; in the audio-book they all had accents.) I teach fourth to sixth graders in Sunday school. Most of them come from Christian homes. They go to Awana; they can recite the books of the Bible and lots of verses (although they are a bit fuzzy on where those verses are found). When I taught about Saul chasing David, one of my boys had watched the video and told the whole story for me. But I’m not at all sure they could tell me who came first: Abraham, Moses or David. Did those guys live before or after Jesus? When were Isaiah and Jeremiah around? Daniel kind of floats through the history of their minds in a perpetual lion’s den. And Esther falls somewhere between Aurora and Princess Jasmine. I have often reviewed books on this blog. Today I would like to review a Sunday school curriculum. Maybe “rave” is a better word; I’m that enthusiastic. When our new pastor asked me to “give leadership to our elementary and pre-school Sunday school program,” it seemed to fit my passion for grounding kids in a strong relationship with the Lord that would make a difference for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t until I said yes that I learned that VBS and summer camp were involved as well as the scholarship committee for our graduating seniors. And then Pastor announced that he thought we needed a new curriculum. (Actually he thought we could write our own, but he was going to have to find a new CE director if he wanted to do that.) I don’t usually go for coffee table books. My coffee table is for practical things like my tea mug and the book I am currently reading. I don’t believe in dusting around decorations. But when I attended the Zondervan reception at Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing (ages ago, it seems, before I became a grandmother again), I was given a copy of their new release, Selections from One Thousand Gifts; Finding Joy in What Really Matters. A natural extension of my Africa picture book collection has been picture books that show African-American culture, especial religious life. (This passion has no doubt been encouraged by our relationships with brothers and sisters at Solid Word Bible Church in Indianapolis.) Besides picking up Under the Baobab Tree at Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing last month, I bought The Beatitudes by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Tim Ladwig. I brought home several new books from Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing a couple weeks ago. I have collected beautiful picture books since I worked in a Logos Bookstore children’s department when I was first married, long before my own kids. My children remember the antique glass cupboard with books that we looked at together, turning the pages carefully with clean hands. In recent years I have focused on books that represent Africa in a positive way. I started crying in the reaping scene, and nearly lost it in the riots. I think I got my cardio-vascular workout from the pounding of my heart through the whole thing. My husband doesn’t want to see the rest of the series when it comes out; it made him too angry—angry at injustice, angry at frivolous disregard for another person’s pain, angry at sin. I’m talking about The Hunger Games. Don’t let the lines of teenagers outside put you off; this is NOT The Twilight Saga or Harry Potter. It is no sappy love story, and it wrestles with issues much closer to our everyday lives than a fantasy allegory. |
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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