Author: Kristi

Book Review: Between Heaven and the Real World

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Between Heaven and the Real World
by Steven Curtis Chapman with Ken Abraham

My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: Memoir

Singer and songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman shares the story of his life so far—childhood, romancing his wife, the road to becoming a household name in Christian music, and the loss of his young daughter. Chapman does not hold back as he tells of doubt, uncertainty, even anger, but also of learning to trust God, to believe He’s working even when we can’t see it, and to let Him lead the way.

I went into this book knowing that there would be tears involved, considering the circumstances around his loss (I don’t know if spoilers are an issue for an autobiography, but I’ll still avoid it, just in case), and I’d imagine it would be even more difficult for those who have experienced a similar loss. The emotion is raw, unfiltered, and there’s no attempt to cover it up and say “God’s got this,” since that would be disingenuous to how they were feeling at the time. One thing Chapman points out in this book is that you can know and fully believe that God is good all the time, and that His plan and timing are perfect, but that won’t necessarily keep you from feeling completely devastated by a loss, especially when in the immediate moments, days, months, when you’re still in shock, reeling, trying to process and figure out how you even take another step forward. This book is certainly not a how-to on picking yourself back up after a devastating loss, trusting in God, and moving forward firmly in His plan, but more a picture of one family’s muddled, messy attempts at finding daylight in the utter darkness.

And of course, this was just one chapter of Chapman’s and his family’s lives (several chapters in the book, though). I appreciated reading about how his earlier life led him to be the man he is and write some of the songs he’s written. I was fascinated by some of the stories behind songs that are well known to me. I do wish some of the theology had been delved into a little more deeply, for example the foundational reason that a loving God allows bad things to happen, but in the end, he was sharing his life, not trying to preach a sermon. I was also often disappointed with the picture placement, because pictures would come too early and sort of “give away” something that was coming. It might have just been an issue with the Kindle version, but then some pictures came on time or a little later than the event was discussed, so who knows. (I fully enjoyed the pictures themselves, though.) Overall, it was a deep, at times dark, fascinating read, and think that fans of Steven Curtis Chapman’s music will enjoy it, as well as people interested in the behind the scenes of the Christian music industry.

Find out more about Between Heaven and the Real World and Steven Curtis Chapman

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April in Review

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I read 8 books last month, an overall light month of reading for me, compared to the rest of the year. I think it was a combination of reading a few books that took longer to get through and working more at my job lately, as well as working more on my own writing. Plus, my audiobook-listening time has been diminished of late, so I only finished 1 last month. I also got pretty lazy at writing the reviews and thus am ending the month with two that I haven’t written yet, which is pretty unusual for me.

Here are the books I read in April:

narnia-4
behind-the-lights
treasure-hunters-1
iq-4
sin-eater
gospel-reset
heaven
Scarlet
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The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis (5 / 5)
Treasure Hunters by James Patterson & Chris Grabenstein (3 / 5)
Behind the Lights by Helen Smallbone (4 / 5)
The Alamo by Roland Smith and Michael P. Spradlin (3.5 / 5)
The Last Sin Eater by Francine Rivers (4 / 5)
Gospel Reset by Ken Ham (4 / 5)
Between Heaven and the Real World by Steven Curtis Chapman with Ken Abraham (review pending)
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (review pending)

This list includes 1 ARC. My favorite book from April was The Silver Chair. I started 1 series, continued 3 series, and finished 0 series. My ever-changing short list of to-be-reads, as well as a flag for the book I’m currently reading and an ongoing list of those I’ve read and posted about can be found here.

I’m also keeping my Goodreads page updated with a more extensive list of to-be-reads. Despite my almost too-long TBR list, I’m always looking for more to add. Feel free to offer suggestions of your favorites or just recent reads you enjoyed.

Book Review: The Last Sin Eater

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The Last Sin Eater
by Francine Rivers

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Historical Christian fiction

Appalachia, 1850s – Cadi Forbes is a 10-year-old member of a clan of Irish immigrants who have resurrected a tradition of their ancestors. Upon the death of a clan member, a ritual is performed to summon the sin eater, who will eat the sins of that person so that the deceased can go to heaven. The sin eater, being a man himself, takes the sins of hundreds, sacrificing his own soul to save the souls of others. Weighed down with the guilt of her own sin, Cadi seeks out the sin eater in the hopes that he can eat her sin now and give her some rest.

Let me start by saying that the setting in this book is top-notch. The way the characters talk took a little getting used to, but that adds to the immersion. Though that makes it all the more strange when a new character shows up partway through the book and talks like a KJV Bible. And stranger still that the other characters seem to have no trouble understanding him.

The story that revolves more directly around Cadi and the sin eater is what I liked most about the book. Her quest to be absolved of her sins and his desire to better understand his role are heartbreaking, yet allow for maximum hopefulness as the story unfolds. I’ll admit I didn’t care for the way the preacher’s storyline plays out though. The book overall feels really allegorical, with a character that is clearly not “real” in the strictest sense of the word and the instantaneous way that the characters know entire passages of the Bible by heart. Not that I’m against an allegory, but there was one particular element in the story that it would have been really nice to get even a partial explanation for that was completely left unaddressed. Overall, though, this was an engaging read, and I think most fans of historical Christian fiction, especially those with a missions-type storyline, would like it.

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Notebook Collection, part 13

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That’s right. Thirteen. And by now, I’m running out of unique things to say at the start of these posts. So let’s just dive right into today’s notebooks.

Past posts about the collection I have so far: Post #1  |  Post #2  |  Post #3  |  Post #4  |  Post #5  |  Post #6  |  Post #7  |  Post #8  |  Post #9 | Post #10 | Post #11 | Post #12

Barnes & Noble has some of the nicest-looking, leather-bound notebooks anywhere. Most of the time that I go, though, I see the same ones I’ve seen before and decided I didn’t have to have quite that badly (or the couple I already have). Every once in a while I’ll see one I don’t remember seeing before that I really like, and if I don’t hide my interest well enough, my husband usually pushes me to buy it. This is one such notebook.

Very few times have I known of a notebook’s existence in advance of then seeking it out to buy it. This is one such notebook. I’ve now read all but the last book of this series and enjoyed it overall, so when I saw on Goodreads that there was a notebook themed after the series, I looked it up online. Not only does it have a creepy cover that fits the overall feel of the stories, every 7 pages or so inside of the book has a picture like those in the books (some are ones I definitely remember seeing before) and a quote from one of the first 3 books in the series, like this:

This marks the first of the largest batch of notebooks I’ve ever bought in one outing, trip, etc. My husband and I went to Cincinnati to visit the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, and being the thrift-shopping lover he is, we went to three different Half-Price Books that were not far from our hotel. HPB has lots of notebooks, all brand new, but my husband spotted this one in a clearance box. I guessed immediately that it was originally from Barnes & Noble, and that it would normally be a lot more than the $2 price tag on it, which meant it was probably written in. I opened it, and sure enough, the “This journal belongs to” line had a name on it. And that was all. My name may not be Emily, but I can pretend it is for such a great deal on a beautiful notebook.

This notebook also came from HPB in Cincy. It’s one of those that I can’t necessarily explain why I liked, but it caught my eye immediately. Maybe it comes from liking Stargate so much, who knows. Some pages inside have images of items in the Ancient Egypt collection in the British Museum, which I also think is really cool.

My only experience playing a musical instrument more than a brief moment in a general music class was when I was in the middle school band in 6th grade. Though I’d always wanted to play the trumpet, I was talked into playing the French horn, I assume because they needed French horn players more than they needed trumpet players. However, while my fellow French horn player had taken lessons before the year started, I was learning from scratch. I remember using the music book to try to understand how to play it while the entire class was learning new songs together, but it was a huge failure. Playing the French horn is about more than just knowing which buttons to push (other brass instruments probably are too, but from what I understand, the French horn is particularly difficult to learn for a beginner). In the entire year I was in band, I never really knew what I was doing and did not choose to continue on the next year. I don’t think there’s anything I could have done differently (YouTube wasn’t a thing back then), and though I don’t exactly look back on that time fondly, since I often felt inept at my inability to play the notes right, I do still think of the French horn somewhat fondly. This notebook, also found at HPB, has a magnetic closure, which is also kind of neat (though might be more trouble than it’s worth during actual use).

Wow, that last one took longer to explain than I expected. I have 4 more notebooks to share, and while I’d like to say they’ll be my last for a while, I’d be like a broken record if I did (plus, both my birthday and Mother’s Day are coming up, so I can’t completely control what those might produce). So I’ll just say…we’ll see what happens.

Do you collect anything related to reading or writing? Feel free to share!

Book Review: Gospel Reset

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Gospel Reset
by Ken Ham

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Christian living

Ken Ham explains in this book that, “The gospel message hasn’t changed, but the way in which it needs to be presented in a secularized culture does need to change.” Since reading Already Gone a few months ago, I’ve started to wonder how our church can better present the truth of the Bible to the youth that attend. Last month, my husband and I went to the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum and came back with some books that my husband wanted to read, including this one, and after reading Gospel Reset, he’s started to have similar thoughts to those I’ve been having.

The book rehashes some of the information presented in Already Gone, but obviously not everyone who reads it will have read the other book (my own husband, for example). To me, the value of the book lies in the comparison of Peter and Paul preaching to Jews and Greeks (respectively) in different chapters of Acts to the culture of America past to America present. Though many of us today already recognize that the culture is a lot less open to hearing about the Gospel than it has been in the past, it’s helpful to have this comparison to the Bible and the early church.

I found most of the illustrations unnecessary (and sometimes confusing), but overall, the viewpoint presented and resources at the end can provide some helpful insight into a big problem facing Christians today.

Find out more about Gospel Reset and Ken Ham’s ministry at Answers in Genesis

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Hardcover Release!

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As a self-published author, I’ve long been thankful that KDP is pretty easy to use, but I was always sad that there wasn’t a hardcover option. But now there is! And I’m so happy to have a hardcover of my first novel!! I’ll eventually have one for the sequel, Outcast, but it’s a slow, somewhat costly process to get one ready and make sure it looks good. For now, I’m ridiculously thrilled to have this in my hands!

For independent authors, reviews are absolutely vital. If you’ve read any of my books, please consider leaving a review somewhere like Amazon or Goodreads. Thank you!

Book Review: The Alamo

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The Alamo
I, Q #4
by Roland Smith & Michael P. Spradlin

My rating: 3.5 / 5
Genre: Children’s spy thriller

Spoiler notice: The following review will contain some spoilers for the previous books in the series, starting with Independence Hall.

New step-siblings Q (short for Quest) and Angela continue to trail a ghost terrorist cell along with SOS, a team made up mostly of retired operatives from the CIA and other organizations. Angela’s mother is climbing her way toward the top of the ghost cell, but the danger is getting higher all the time. Meanwhile, something strange is going on with Boone, and is Q’s dad friend or foe?

Here we have part 4 of the series-long story, the kind of series that you really need to start from the beginning. This is the first book that is co-written by another author, but it’s not super noticeable to me. Though I will say that this is the first book that starts with a list of all of the characters and a recap of past events, which my aging memory appreciated. Overall, though, it doesn’t feel particularly new. None of the questions from the last book are answered and are really only muddied more. The characters gain a very small amount of ground, and some of the plot points feel like a rehash.

There’s still a lot of action, and I like the way that the series moves around the country to different major locations. I think there are some discrepancies regarding the relative placements of the Alamo Plaza and the San Fernando Cathedral, an area I’ve studied recently for my job (https://www.getbeyondthewalls.com/), so that brought me out of the story a little. However, I’m still really interested in seeing where the rest of this series goes.

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Notebook Collection, part 12

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It’s official. I have a sickness. I had planned to get caught up on new notebooks with this post, but then, I bought 3 more. And then last week, my husband and I took a trip, and I came back with SEVEN notebooks! Even for me, even though buying notebooks on vacations is common for me, seven is a lot. Now it’ll take me 2 more posts after this one to be caught up. I know I say this often, but I really need to stop buying notebooks.

Past posts about the collection I have so far: Post #1  |  Post #2  |  Post #3  |  Post #4  |  Post #5  |  Post #6  |  Post #7  |  Post #8  |  Post #9 | Post #10 | Post #11

Now and then, I buy a notebook for which I can’t really explain my interest. As soon as I saw this in a local bargain store, though, I knew that I had to buy it. The unique design that made it interesting to me will make it difficult to actually use, as the pages inside are split the same way the cover is. But since I have so many notebooks and won’t use most of them for a really long time (if ever, as sad as it makes me to say that), it’s easy to disregard the potential difficulty. The pages, both top and bottom parts, have images of various food on them too. I really wonder who the creator(s) of this notebook had in mind when designing it.

This notebook came from the store in our area that’s only open at Christmas time. Curious George was a major favorite show of both of my kids, now 20 and 12, so it will always hold a special place in my heart too.

This notebook and the one below were picked up in the Dominican Republic when I went down there for a week to visit my sister’s family and bring my daughter back, who visited for a month. I knew the one souvenir I wanted to be sure to get was a notebook of some kind that would reflect the culture down there in some way. In particular, I was hoping for some Spanish (which I don’t speak) as a reminder of my time there. Though both of these notebooks were picked up at La Sirena, a big-box store similar to Walmart here in the states, I really liked the look of them, inside and out. They seem to be geared toward students, based on the pages inside, like this one:

Also from the DR, I particularly liked some of the pages inside this one, info from various subjects, all in Spanish, of course. Below are a couple of examples:

I saw this one at Half Price Books and really liked the look of it. At first glance, it looks like the inside of a geode, but the more I look at it, the more I see other things in the cover. I can imagine it being different kinds of liquid swirling together. Or even a nebula up close. It’s like a Rorschach test in a way—maybe what someone thinks it looks like says something about their personality.

I have to laugh when I realize that at the end of my previous notebook post, I said I may have even bought a single new notebook by the time I get to writing the next post about them. Because in fact, I’ve bought ten more since then. One is the last one from this post, and the other nine, I’ll split into two posts. Even though it’s laughable to say this by now, I really am going to try to reign myself in going forward.

Do you collect anything related to reading or writing? Feel free to share!

Book Review: Treasure Hunters

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Treasure Hunters
Book #1
by James Patterson & Chris Grabenstein
read by Brian Kennedy

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Children’s adventure

The Kidds are a family of treasure hunters. They live on a boat, traveling the world, recovering various kinds of items from shipwrecks. But after the separate but equally mysterious disappearances of both of their parents, the Kidd children are left on their own to deal with a band of pirates who want their treasure and local authorities who don’t want them to be left on their own. Then some clues surface that point at evidence to what really happened to their parents, and the adventure really begins.

I’m a bit torn on this book. The overall story was fun and adventurous and ends with a promise of more of the same. The main cast consists of 4 kids: the oldest is Tommy, then Storm, and twins Bick and Beck (short for Bickford and Rebecca). Bick is the narrator of the book, and Beck draws the illustrations along the way. I had to borrow the ebook to be able to see the illustrations, and I liked them, even one part when they were drawn by a different character.

However, I wrote more notes while listening, of things I wanted to remember for later, than I have for any book I’ve ever read. Not all of these notes were of issues I had with the story. For example, there was a gang of pirates that were basically surfer dudes, and the way they were voiced by the narrator gave that part of the story a major 3 Ninjas vibe, which I quite enjoyed. The narrator did a good job of sounding like a 12-year-old boy most of the time, but sounding like older characters when needed, too. Now and then, he seemed to put the emphasis in the wrong place, but overall, I liked the narrator.

What most of my notes boil down to are things I didn’t like about the way characters are presented or written. Tommy was probably my favorite of the Kidds. He’s uncomplicated and smarter than he seems. Storm is a fairly stereotypical, way-too-smart-to-be-believable character, even to the point of being overweight and socially awkward. It seems a little too much like the author(s) enjoys shaming fat people, not just because of this character (and it had to be pretty deliberate to make her this way, since it’s unlikely to me that someone living the way this family does would become so overweight), but because there are two other characters in the book that are described as ridiculously obese, and the narrator, who knows how much his sister hates to be teased about her weight, is not remotely kind in his descriptions of those characters.

Then we have Bick and Beck and their “twin tirades,” which are quick argument “squalls.” After a few of these, I realized that they’re really just a way for them to discuss opposing views, but they start out already angry. They mostly feel forced, and frankly, their parents should have put a stop to them a long time ago, insisting instead that they find a calmer and more healthy way to communicate. Also, all three of the kids were far too cavalier about the perceived deaths of their parents. They moved on so fast, it was as if they weren’t very attached to them.

This is the first of anything by James Patterson that I’ve read, but I have enjoyed books by Chris Grabenstein before. I’d really like to see where this story goes and hope that some of what I didn’t like about this book will be lessened in the future, as the series continues.

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Book Review: Behind the Lights

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Behind the Lights
by Helen Smallbone

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Memoir

Helen Smallbone is the mother of seven children who are all adults now, three of which are well-known in Christian music—Rebecca St. James and brothers Joel and Luke of for KING & COUNTRY. In this book, she shares the story of her family, from moving from Australia to the US where everyone pitched in to keep them all afloat, to working together to put on Rebecca St. James’s shows once she got into the music industry, and to how for KING & COUNTRY got started.

One of the things I liked about this book was that way it was so conversational, like she’s telling her story in person. And she’s not afraid to talk about the mistakes made by her or anyone else in her family. I appreciate the way she ties every lesson learned into God and the Bible. Though very little of her incredible life is very relatable to me, I was still quite immersed in the book and was carried along with the ups and downs.

I’ve seen hints of at least Joel & Luke’s involvement in Rebecca St. James’s concerts, but the overall story of the entire family working at their oldest sister’s concerts and growing into their roles was the most interesting to me. It gives a lot of insight into what I’ve said since pretty much the first time I saw fK&C in concert—they put on some of the best live shows I’ve ever been to. And now I can see how their talent as performers had early roots. I’m really glad I read this book, and think that fans of Rebecca St. James and/or for KING & COUNTRY will enjoy it, as well as people interested in the behind the scenes of the Christian music industry (though I was fairly disappointed by some of what I read about that).

Thank you to Netgalley and K-LOVE Books for providing me a copy of this book to review.

Find out more about Behind the Lights and for KING & COUNTRY
Publication date: April 12, 2022

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