The Barefoot Believers is a light and engaging Christian novel about two sisters whose lifelong rivalry comes to a head in midlife when they find themselves stranded together at their family’s old vacation home, each with an injury that restricts mobility, forced to rely on and put up with each other. While there, one [...]
Like lots of Adventist kids I grew up reading the books published by our SDA publishing houses — Swift Arrow is the one that comes to mind since our elementary-school teachers read it aloud almost every year. My guilty little secret, though, is that these were never my favourite books — they were almost [...]
This is a book I should love, but I’m afraid I didn’t.
In my ceaseless quest for excellent Biblical fiction, I stumbled across Etzioni-Halevy’s earlier book, The Song of Hannah, last year and read it. I didn’t think it was as good as it could have been, but I was willing to try another book by her [...]
First of all, I love the title. In case you missed the references, “SAHM” is the acronym for Stay At Home Mother, which I used to be, and “Sam I Am” is a character in one of the Dr. Seuss books that most SAHMs have read out loud a thousand times so [...]
Not being normally a romance reader, I started picking up “inspirational romance” novels a few months ago in the name of market research — because I had a story I wanted to write that seemed it would fit better into that category than any other. Of all the inspirational romances I’ve read during this “market [...]
I think most people know that I’m a big fan of good Biblical fiction , since I write it myself. Zipporah is the second volume of Marek Halter’s “Canaan trilogy” and focuses on an intriguing minor character almost buried in the Biblical footnotes — Moses’ wife Zipporah, who is described both as the daughter of [...]
The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas is the latest of my forays into “Christian women’s fiction,” In the case of this novel, the cover art, breezy tone, and Steeple Hill Cafe imprint all suggest it’s best categorized as “Christian chicklit” — light, humourous, but with a spiritual undertone.
Seldom have I wanted to like a [...]
Like my previous selection, Sandpiper Drift, I chose A Time to Mend specifically because I was exploring the sub-genre of “inspirational women’s fiction,” particularly the Steeple Hill imprint. This particular novel has a typical romance-novel plot structure: two strong-willed, independent souls strike sparks of all kinds when they meet in the hospital where she’s [...]
I mentioned when talking about the Ann Burton books, below, that I’ve always had this sort of ingrained prejudice against books that could be easily labelled romance novels — even though I do like a good love story with a happy ending. However, the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo this year seems to fall into [...]
As some of you may know, I’m a bit of a connaisseur of Biblical fiction, and not just because I write the stuff myself. I initially shied away from Ann Burton’s Women of the Bible series because of the rather romance-novel look of their packaging (oh, my prejudices!) but when she released a book on [...]
