Penhaligon’s Gift by Terri Nixon
Although this is a continuation of the complex relationships we have discovered in the earlier books of the series, it is a valid standalone story in its own right.
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The Making of Us by Sheridan Voysey
This is no pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, eight-days-to-Christian-maturity workbook! It doesn’t offer much in the way of answers. Rather, many soul-searching questions.
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Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
This is one of the best of Dickens’ works, in my opinion. True, it starts off heavy and bleak, but Mr. Squeers and Dotheboys Hall do play a significant rôle throughout the book. If anything, the digression involving Mr. Crummles and his performing troupe could have been omitted without loss to the story.
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Our kids were already a bit old for the Harry Potter books when they emerged in 1997. At that time we moved in rather narrow-minded circles and stories of witches and dark magic were frowned upon. So we never read them. Until now. As a would-be author, I can hardly ignore successful writers like J.K….
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Esther and Athaliah, two plays adapted from those of Jean Racine by Richard Bunning
As a tame introduction to the work of Jean Racine, this adaptation is most helpful, presenting the plays in abridged form and in contemporary English. Unfortunately, they thereby lose some of their claim to fame as “masterpieces of one of the greatest literary artists known”. Both plays follow the biblical narratives rather closely, while adding some…
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That Man Jesus by Martin Down
Did you know that Jesus experienced sexual temptation? See below. Down relates Jesus’s life chronologically, including almost all the details from the gospels and adding occasional human touches, such as His heart searching concerning His identity and mission, and that He had a friend near the Jordan at whose house He stayed several days. Such…
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Call of the Druids by Fiona Tarr
The premise of this book is intriguing: Ariel, a Jewish priestess and niece of King David, is sent on a mysterious quest by the angel Raziel. Not to a far-off country, but to a period a thousand years later, at the height of the Roman Empire, and shortly after the Crucifixion of the Jewish Messiah. The customs…
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Sergei and Hans by Dennis Santaniello
This is a very unusual book – both as regards the theme and the style. Two WWI soldiers experience the horrors of war, slaughtering mercilessly and seeing their comrades slaughtered. Each one finds himself alone in the most devastating conditions on a mountainside in the Romanian Carpathians. All of their respective companions have died –…
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The Road to Nowhere by Catherine M. Byrne
Isa and her young family emigrate from the tiny Orkney island of Raumsey to Alberta, where her parents are already living. An unfortunate young English girl, Sarah, happens to arrive at the same time, destined to marry a friend of her father’s, who is much older than she. The vastness of the prairie environment and…
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Mary Rosie’s War by Catherine Byrne
This book, number 5 in the Raumsey series, not only portrays the horrors of WWII through the eyes of simple, ordinary participants, but sheds a sidelong glance at the morality of a war initiated at some high level, far away from those who are forced to carry it out without understanding why.
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Wild at Heart by John Eldredge
Eldredge has hit on something big! He dares to turn his back on the common modern Christian perspective on society (esp. masculine roles) and explore the deep, real motives and needs of men. His analysis is rather one-sided (e.g. every man carries a wound given by his father P.60) and so is his remedy: accept…
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Deep convictions under fire. Flame in the Night by Heather Munn
Flame in the Night by Heather Munn is a captivating drama about the resistance movement in occupied France during WWII. Teenage scouts conceal Jewish children from the Gestapo in remote farms, attics, treetops and caves. Meanwhile, all around them everyday life continues as usual: cultivating vegetables, going to school, shovelling snow, attending church. Plot An…