Susan is having a fabulous contest! Go here to enter it. You can win a Kindle and the PJ Sugar series!
This book was provided for review by LitFuse.
Susan is having a fabulous contest! Go here to enter it. You can win a Kindle and the PJ Sugar series!
This book was provided for review by LitFuse.
From the back cover:
Ghost Town is the hottest amusement park in the country, but when Maia Peters visits, she’s not expecting to be impressed. The daughter of two world-renowned “ghost hunters,” she’s grown up around the paranormal and to her most of the park is just Hollywood special effects. Until the very last attraction.
There, in a haunted house, a face appears from the mist. The face of Jordin Cole, a girl Maia knows. A girl, Maia discovers, who has gone missing.
Convinced what she saw wasn’t a hoax and desperate to find Jordin, Maia launches into a quest for answers. Joined by Jordin’s boyfriend–a pastor’s kid with very different ideas about the paranormal–the two soon find themselves in a struggle on the edge of the spirit realm as dangerous forces try to keep the truth from emerging.
Resurrection in May by Lisa Samson is the story of May Seymour and her friend, an old man named Claudius Borne. I found this book very hard to get into. The characters didn’t grab my attention and didn’t pull me into their world. I have to be honest and say that I was so bored with this book that I didn’t quite finish it. I just couldn’t bear to. Oh well. Not every book is for every reader. I know that Lisa Samson has a huge following and I’m sure fans of hers will enjoy her latest novel.
From the back cover:
A strange and wondrous friendship ignites a fire of love in May Seymour’s life.
Lovely and winsome May Seymour graduated from college with the world at her feet…and no idea what to do with it. A spontaneous mission trip to Africa brought a great surprise—love—and a strong sense of purpose. But in loving others there, she encountered a severed tragedy that left her deeply wounded.
She comes to heal at the farm of Claudius Borne—a sweet, kind old man who understands plants and animals far better than people. And his farm becomes May’s home.
There on the farm, May renews a friendship with an old college flame named Eli whose path has taken unexpected turns too. As May tries to convince Eli to grab hold of life once again, he begins to pull May fro her sheltered existence. Like old Claudius’s farm in Spring, May begins to blossom back into life. But no resurrection ever comes without sacrifice—and this sacrifice will forever transform May.
Lisa Samson, the Christy-award winning author of Christianity Today’s Novel of the Year Quaker Summer, has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as one of the “most powerful voices in Christian fiction.” She lives in Kentucky with her husband and three kids.
You've probably heard the many negative media reports about the evangelical church, such as:
But are these truly accurate?
In Christians are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told, sociologist Bradley R.E. Wright shatters these popular myths, along with many others. Using the best available data, he reveals to readers why and how many of the commonly shared statistics are incomplete and inaccurate.
This book was provided for review by Bethany House.
Forgotten-Seventeen and Homeless by Melody Carlson is a glimpse into the life of an American teenager who moves to a new school district and realizes that she can be whatever/whoever she wants to be in this new town. Adele finds friends quickly with the in-crowd while at the same time finds her home life falling apart. She ends up being abandoned by her druggie mother and living in the back of a beat up old van while trying to hide this new life from her new friends. Author Melody Carlson captures teenage life like no other and does a great job pulling the reader right into the story. With realistic characters and situations, I don't know how she keeps pumping these books out! This is a must read for teen girls. Mia learns some tough lessons, including learning who her real friends are, asking for help shouldn’t be embarrassing, and the most important one of all, that honesty is always best all the while being pointed to the saving grace of Jesus by a pastor that she meets at an outreach mission. While I felt the book ended a little abruptly I still think it’s an excellent tool for teens.
Thanks, Melody, for this CLEAN READ.
She went looking for adventure . . . and found more than she bargained for.
Kate Evans is an adventurous and independent young woman with a pioneering spirit. When she leaves her home in Washington State to follow her dream of being an Alaskan bush pilot, she knows it will be an uphill battle. But she never expected it to be quite like this. As the lone woman in a man’s world, she finds that contending with people’s expectations is almost as treacherous as navigating the wild arctic storms.
When she crosses paths with a mysterious man living alone in the forbidding wilderness, she faces a new challenge. Can Kate break through the walls he has put up around his heart? And will fear keep her from realizing her dreams?
Touching the Clouds will draw you in with raw emotion and suspense, all against the stunning backdrop of the Alaskan wilds.
This book was proved for review by the author and Revell.
Long before becoming a pastor, Ed Underwood was a “Jesus Freak”—a young man transformed by the Jesus Movement in the 60s and 70s. He and his friends threw their hearts into a revival they thought would change the world. Except it didn’t.
Instead, as the years passed, the Jesus Movement seemed to stop moving. How did all those passionate, young Christians morph into today’s tame, suburban evangelicals? That question sparked this passionate, provocative book, which exposes six seductive lies that can sidetrack a revival… and affirms five life-changing truths that can keep it going.
Underwood writes to fan the flames of enduring revival today: “I’m asking God to use this book to show those of us from the Jesus Movement generation how to finish what we started. But more than that, I’m begging Him to call Christians of every generation to the radical commitment that fuels revival.”
Visit The Jesus Movement Blog to read Ed’s latest posts
and view videos about the book.
Excerpt taken from Reborn to be Wild by Ed Underwood © David C Cook, 2010.
The Outsiders
It intrigues me that Springsteen used the same word the apostle Paul used to describe those who now find room for their ideas in a revolution—outsiders.
Paul used the Greek term three times to remind Christians of their responsibility to live in a way that “outsiders” (NIV, NASB) or “those outside” (NKJV) would want to know more about Jesus (1 Cor. 5:12; Col. 4:5; 1 Thess. 4:12). Outsider is his technical theological description of people who live outside of God’s mercy and grace. Outsiders were those living in the domain of darkness, outside the borders of the kingdom of the Son of His love (Col. 1:13).
Even if I didn’t know what the Bible called it, I couldn’t think of a better title for the place we lived before God’s love brought us inside—darkness. The revolution reached into the darkness outside, where we lived:
• Tough, hip neighborhoods where God was for dorky church kids and the only thing we liked about Jesus was that he wore long hair and sandals.
• Busy, preoccupied homes that didn’t have time for the silly charades of religious folk.
• A culture in which grace was when a well-starched family took the booth next to yours in a restaurant, bowed their heads and folded their hands in a way that made everyone around them feel weird.
• Neighborhoods where loyal, lifelong friendships seemed to be unraveling from the pressures of growing up, where mercy was what you called for just before blacking out when the big neighbor kid caught you in his famous “sleeper hold.”
Oh, it was darkness all right. But it didn’t seem dark to us then, before we saw the light. It was just life, our reality, our dark reality. From the core of our blackened souls to the gloomy, immoral rhythms of our everyday lives, to the sinister generational evil we were trying to ignore, we were incapable of knowing anything but darkness.
I think our hopelessness had a lot to do with our revolution that became a revival. From the darkness of our lives, we couldn’t see the light, had never seen it before. We didn’t entertain ideas about how much the light might need us or how it could improve our lives in ways that would enhance our career or get us to heaven when we were through doing what we wanted to do down here. We were blinded by the light.
Before we met Jesus, we were outsiders and we knew it. After we took Him at His word, we were insiders, and we knew that, too. And we knew how we got on the inside. Jesus rescued us from darkness. We couldn’t quote it from memory because we probably didn’t know where to find it in our crisp new American Standard New Testaments, but when we read His words, we knew Peter was talking about us when he said:
But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy. (1 Peter 2:9–10)
If you’re going to have a revolution, you need to have new ideas. If you’re going to find new ideas, they will never come from those who are comfortably inside. They come from the outside, from outsiders. Even though we were now inside the borders of the kingdom of the Son of God’s love, the old insiders never did embrace us. To them we would always be outsiders.
It didn’t bother us much. Actually, it didn’t bother us at all. To be totally honest, we dug it. Our hearts were on fire with the love of Christ and we didn’t really trust them with the fire anyway. All they wanted to do was douse it, control it, or worse, take credit for it.
And so we did what outsiders often do, we started a revolution fueled by a passion insiders can’t know… unless they reach out to us. And like revolutions everywhere, our fresh expressions of truth didn’t move along the protected stain-glassed corridors of the institutional church. Our revival happened in the very places that had been deserted by most religious insiders as they watched in horror, threw up their hands, and screamed bloody murder from inside their cloistered fortresses of irrelevance. It happened on the street.
Reborn to Be Wild by Ed Underwood