Review:
Bewitching is Alex Flinn’s latest fairy tale retelling and I just loved it. She sets the Cinderella story in a Miami middle school, then frames it with the story of Kendra, a girl who became an eternal witch during the plague of 1666. Kendra tells us two stories of her own, both fairy tale retellings that can stand alone as lovely and poignant tales, and also shed light on the larger story. Structurally it’s quite brilliant, and she’s also come up with a really original voice for both of her heroines. I can’t say enough good things about it!

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Review:
This is my second time reading Under the Banner of Heaven, and I got so much out of it this time. The importance of Mormonism on the history of the American West is something that I never learned about, even as an American Studies major in college. It’s just fascinating to me and I want to learn a lot more about it. My one disappointing quibble is that in the last pages of the book, Krakauer calls Mormonism a Christian sect, and it made me wish that he had used his skills as a journalist to engage with the Mormon theology, which bears no resemblance to orthodox Christianity, Protestant or Catholic. There are superficial similarities, but Mormonism really is its own religion.

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Review:
I live in an apartment in New York City and so I might seem like the last person to be drawn to a book called Your Custom Homestead. But actually it was perfect for me. Sure, I’m never going to have acres and goats, but I’ve got big dreams for my balcony garden and know that someday I will own chickens. Jill’s ideas and suggestions are helpful for crafting an individual vision of what homesteading is. Basically, homesteading is about self-sufficiency, learning to make do for yourself so that you don’t need to depend on technology to live the good life. I already cook a lot from scratch (my chicken stock is the elixir of life), and my next project is to learn canning–hopefully with veggies from my balcony garden! And as a homeschooling mom I plan to teach my girls all kinds of real life skills so that they can make things, fix things, and create things. This book will continue to be a great source of inspiration.

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Review:
I love Tsh. Love her. I am inspired every time I read her blog or listen to her podcast. Her book Organized Simplicity just makes the kind of life I want seem so effortless. Here, in One Bite at a Time, Tsh breaks it down into easy pieces. What I love about this book is that it’s a great reference. I am already pretty organized, my home is pretty clutter-free, and I’m pretty efficient. I now have some ideas for where I want to go next and when I’m ready to take those steps I can refer back to the book for ideas and inspiration.

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Review:
Oh, my, and it was good to hear Roland’s voice again, you say true and I say thankya. With the series complete, King didn’t need to add to his Dark Tower saga, but The Wind Through the Keyhole feels like it’s been there the whole time.

The framing story follows Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy the billy-bumbler as they leave the Emerald City and follow the Path of the Beam towards the Dark Tower. Caught in a sudden, immense freezing storm called a starkblast, the ka-tet finds shelter. To pass the time, Roland volunteers a story in which he tells a story about a fictional starkblast and a boy named Tim Stoutheart.

In Roland’s story, he goes back to the time just after he killed his mother, when is father sent him out to a remote mining town where a skin-man is performing brutal murders in the form of an animal. One survivor holds the key to trapping the vicious monster, but Roland is inexperienced and may not have what it takes to bring peace to the town.

To wait out a terrifying night with the witness, a terrified young boy, Roland tells him a story that his mother used to tell him. Tim Stoutheart loses his father and his mother remarries. Her new husband is a brute, and when the Covenant Man comes to town, he gives Tim a token that unlocks a devastating series of events for Tim and his family. Tim, just a boy, must gather all his courage to take a magical journey into a forest populated by dragons, bad fairies, venomous pythons, mud people, and a wizard out of mythology.

Much has been made of the changes that happen offscreen between Wizard and Glass and The Wolves of the Calla (my personal favorite). Eddie, Susannah, and Jake become true gunslingers and we don’t really see how it happens. This is King’s answer. Becoming a gunslinger, in the end, simply means choosing to be a gunslinger. That’s how Roland and Tim Stoutheart survive their tales. It’s like they put on an identity, and when they succeed, it’s like they’ve never not been gunslingers. And that’s what Jake, Susannah, and Eddie will have to do.

The three stories are deftly embedded and the whole thing moves and I just didn’t want it to end.

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Review:
I seriously can’t stop reading about Mormon fundamentalism. Stolen Innocence told yet another story of a girl’s life ruined by the out-of-control men who get to do whatever they want with impunity.

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Review:
Carolyn Jessop’s story is fascinating and inspiring. As a mom myself, I was moved by her love for her children and her tenacity at making the system work for her. In Escape,
she takes readers through her harrowing journey from true believing sister wife to crusader for justice.

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Review:
After You Believe just blew my mind. I never thought much about sanctification beyond feeling like I’m a failure because the fruit of the Spirit don’t come naturally to me and I suck at following the rules. According to Wright, a British theologian, I’ve fallen prey to a very common error.

I really can’t do justice to the depth of this book in a short blog post, but basically he says that we should view Christian character as beginning a journey that will continue in heaven. We will have work to do in heaven and we can begin it now. We put on Christian virtue and it will feel funny at first, but the more we put it on (the fruit of self-control), the more natural it will feel and we will be changed, a change that will continue our whole lives and then be completed when we are glorified when we see the face of God in heaven.

I better just give you a quote:

Royal priests are, in short, to work at revealing the glory of God to the world. That is the task of the renewed Temple. But if, as in John’s gospel, the glory of God is revealed when Jesus of Nazareth goes to the cross as the supreme act of Love, then we should expect that God’s glory will be reflected out into the world when Jesus’ followers learn the habits of mind, heart, and life that imitate the generous love of Jesus and thus bring new order, beauty, and freedom to the world.

We are given…the promise that the earth shall be full of the knowledge and glory of God, as the waters cover the sea; we are given the resurrection of Jesus to be the start of that project; and we are given the Holy Spirit to enable us to anticipate the former by implementing the latter. To begin on those tasks does not mean we know it all and can see exactly what needs doing. It means that we are committed to taking the difficult first steps towards acquiring the corporate habits that will be justice-generating, beauty-producing, and freedom-enhancing, and to continuing the many-sided debates as to what exactly those phrases will mean. And, once again, every follower of Jesus will have his or her own unique and interestingly different vocation within this complex overall project.

There is so much more, and I will definitely be reading this book again and again and again.

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Review:
Church of Lies is an incredibly powerful story. The beginning chapters describing Flora Jessop’s abuse at the hands of her father were harrowing and there was a lot I had to skip over because it was a bit too explicit. But when the story turned to Flora’s attempts to work within and outside of the system to rescue girls from polygamy, I fell in love with her courage and spirit and passion.

The Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints are a sect/cult of Mormonism led by Warren Jeffs, the Prophet. He controls his followers through fear and indoctrination, teaching them from childhood that they will go to hell if they don’t do what he says. The men curry favor with him, otherwise they will be kicked out and their wives and children reassigned to someone else. Of course, they’re all also waiting for Jeffs to die in the hopes that they can become the next Prophet.

There are some warring branches of the FLDS, as I learned in Daughters of Zion. It’s hard to tell them apart because they share only a few last names among them. Flora Jessop was part of the same group as Carolyn Jessop, but she was born a Jessop instead of marrying one like Carolyn. Their group lives in the “twin cities” in Arizona near Colorado, where everyone is FLDS. That means that there’s no safe place for the abused kids to turn to for help. They’re beaten at school, raped at home, the girls are married off at 14 and the boys kicked out of the community because they’re competition for the older men who want to collect wives for celestial glory. And over and above them all is Warren Jeffs, child molester, rapist, and demagogue.

That Flora Jessop could leave the FLDS is amazing–but her story is even more incredible. She gets involved with a network of safe houses that help girls who want to leave the FLDS, only to find that the police and CPS just don’t understand the depth of depravity of the indoctrination foisted upon these poor kids. The girls have no clue they have any civil rights at all. The boys who are allowed to stay are told they are mini prophets and after age 12 all women have to obey them. All of them live in poverty. Physical abuse runs both ways, and many of the children are molested. It’s just so psychologically complex.

Near the end of the book, Flora touches on some of her spiritual journey, wrestling with the concept of God and her inability to move past her hatred of the God she was taught about in the FLDS. There is a truly amazing scene near the end of the book between Flora and her rapist father that points to tremendous spiritual growth on Flora’s part. I wish she had time to tell us more about that part of things, because I really hope that Flora finds healing on that level, too.

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Review:
I really wanted Asylum to be as awesome as Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan, and it just wasn’t. I loved all the texture and historical detail, but all the scary stuff just didn’t play. And the love story was pretty one-dimensional. I almost didn’t finish it because my unmet expectations were bumming me out too much.

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