My Review of "Waiting for Morning"

Karen Kingsbury's Waiting for Morning is the first of her novels I've ever read. So I was excited to get to review Waiting for Morning, and although it had its imperfections, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think the characters are, for the most part, very real.

The story recounts the tragedy of Hannah Ryan. Hannah waits at home for her family -- her husband and two teenaged daughters -- to return from a camping trip. But what she wants, isn't want she gets. Instead, a police car pulls into her driveway, delivering to her the worst news a mother and wife could imagine. The aftermath of what has happened is simple: Hannah is full of rage and grief and makes it her missing to get revenge on Brian Wesley, the drunk driver who took her family from her. Somewhere along the way, she began to blame God, too, and now it's up to two people to bring her peace and forgiveness and closeness to God again.

The story weaves the biblical text of Lamentations into the real lives of people who face extraordinary loss. What we find in Waiting for Morning is a Christian retelling of the story of Lamentations -- the movements and moments between grief and hope, between anger and forgiveness. What readers find here is a moving story of just how those things must exist together. Without grief, hope becomes insipid. Without forgiveness, anger only becomes bitterness.

Certain elements of the story are predictable -- those are Waiting for Morning's imperfections. And I had to suspend my disbelief more than once. (Jenny is a particular character that I found just too unbelievable to be real.) But if you overlook those, Kingsbury's Waiting for Morning is a novel worth reading.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.

Comments

My Review of "The Tea Planter's Wife"

Dinah Jefferies' The Tea Planter's Wife is a fun novel that vividly depicts the 1920s. Gwendolyn Hooper, her 19-year-old heroine, speaks for an empire-branded breed of gutsy young British women who left the security of England to embark on extraordinary adventures abroad. Not the back-packing, "lonely planet" travels of today, gap-year kids constantly connected with the folks back home via internet and smartphones, and usually safely and predictably back home for good inside a year. Girls like Gwen married men who made their living and fortunes out in the colonies -- or what until very recently had been colonies -- and went out to join them, standing shoulder-to shoulder with their husbands to face down hardship, danger, disease, monsoon, drought, and not least the simmering and sometimes murderous resentment of locals. That makes The Tea Planter's Wife so much more than a love story -- it's a recognition that girls like Gwen had guts, and c...

My Review of "The Air I Breathe"

Louie Giglio's The Air I Breathe: Worship as a Way of Life is a deceptively small book packed with insights. Perhaps his most important, though, will also seem his simplest: Everyone worships something or someone, because God has designed us all with the drive to worship. We only have to study how we spend our time, energy, affection and money to discover the current object of our worship. Thinking about worship in light of the book's simplest definition -- "our response to what we value most" -- is both eye-opening and thought-provoking. The Air I Breathe then proceeds to urge readers to devote their worship to God (the only One who's worthy of it) and to make worship a way of life rather than just something they do in church. Giglio's beautiful writing -- which is full of simple, yet profound statements and fresh energy -- successfully motivates readers to ponder his points. But as persuasive as his narrative is, it lacks su...

My Review of "The Prayer Wheel"

Patton Dodd, Jana Riess, and David van Biema's The Prayer Wheel: A Daily Guide to Renewing Your Faith a Rediscovered Spiritual Practice brings a long-lost diagram that can be used to structure a 28-day discipline of prayer back into the practice of modern Christian spirituality. The diagram was found in a 12th-century German book of gospels that emerged at a rare book dealer in Manhattan in 2015. They begin with a cursory explanation of the wheel's origins but are primarily interested in reviving the use of the wheel to guide and enrich prayer by tying each day to a different thematic element of scripture. In concentric rings representing sections of the Bible and through seven "contemplative paths toward God" arranged like spokes through the rings he wheel uses Christianity's "big ideas" about the Lord's Prayer, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, events in the life of Christ, and the beatitudes to form a progression of prayer. The Praye...

The Mrs. & the Minister

Search This Blog