Review: "Prayers for New Brides" by Jennifer O. White

We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)

Prayers for New Brides: Putting on God's Armor After the Wedding Dress is a 40 chapter devotional for newly married, soon to be married, or even long-time married brides. It focuses on praying for your husband and God's will for your marriage. It also spends quite a bit of time talking about spiritual battle and truths about marriage.

Each chapter has a discussion, prayer, and "call to action"/journal suggestion. Example chapters include "God Is Fighting for You," "See Your Spouse through God's Eyes," "Praise: Your Love Song to God and First Line of Defense," "Cement the Experience of Unity," and "Communicate as a Team." The prayers are personalizable, frequently using blanks for you to fill in your husband's name and sometimes require more in depth thought to fill in the blanks with personal examples and experiences. At the end of each small paragraph of prayer, the Bible verses that inspired it are cited so that you can look at them further.

Overall, I thought it was a well-compiled discussion of God's role in marriage and how to go into marriage sure-footed. I would recommend doing no more than one chapter a day to get the most out of it -- the book even suggests if doing it as a devotional with a group that five chapters a week for eight weeks is a good way to tackle it. There's not many personal examples in the book, so it can be hard to take in a bunch of chapters all at once and still take something away from them.

Though I'm sure every woman would take something different away from this book, I'll share a few points that stood out to me. In the "Sacrifice Your Expectations" chapters  the prayer invites you to bring your expectations of marriage before God including all the outside influences from media and couples in your life. The prayer describes these expectations as "limiting," which was a refreshing way to look it. In the "Covering His Priorities, Time, and Energy" chapter, the prayer included thanking God for creating your husband with his specific passions, personality, and talents as well as talking about how God knows the rhythm of time your husband needs to divide his time between work, marriage, serving God, and rest. As a last note, the chapter on "Fear Less: Your Privilege as a Wife" quotes 2 Timothy 1:7 "For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control," where the whole chapter focuses on surrendering your fears to God.

While I thought most of this book was well done, there were some parts that I didn't agree 100% with the author, her discussion, or the Bible verses she used to support her ideas, but some disagreement is to be expected and it didn't interfere with the parts I did find helpful.

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for free from Cross Focused Reviews for this review.  The opinion in this review is unbiased and reflects my honest judgment of the product.

Review: "The Curse of Crow Hollow" by Bill Coffey

Small town friends Scarlett, Cordelia, Hays, and Naomi ditch their own party to have a private camping trip up by the town's old mines -- an area that has been fenced off mad locked up since before they were born. Superstition, rumor, and small town gossip were enough to keep most people away from the mines and from Alvaretta, whom most in the town called a witch and swore there were demons up in the mines to boot.

The narrator is a friendly southern voice, a resident of Crow Hollow, detailing the madness that took over the town to an out-of-towner. The tale begins with this teenage camping trip that ends up leading the friends to the witch's house where she promptly curses them and they barely escape alive after glimpsing some living thing that Alvaretta is desperately trying to keep hidden. 

The friends return to town, hurry to church, and desperately try to act as though nothing has happened.  Part way through the service though, the three girls are seized by fits and each develop alarming symptoms. Scarlett loses her ability to speak, Naomi has constant uncontrollable spasms, and Cordelia's face droops and is unresponsive to any muscle movement. 

With doctors stumped, the friends have no choice but to come clean about the witch's curse. Soon after, all of the other young girls in the town develop symptoms mimicking those of the original three. The town begins to fall apart as blame, rumor, and suspicion threaten to destroy the small town community. Long-held secrets come to light and questions of faith and demons, innocence and guilt, ravage the town. 

It is a dark and gripping tale that starts off at full rush with the friends getting cursed, but then slows down a lot as reader is introduced to the members of the town, setting up for the interconnected role they all play in the town's impending downfall. The final chapters speed back up to breakneck pace, packed with action and answers to the many puzzles introduced.

There's a lot of characters to keep straight and I had a little trouble remembering which kid went with which parents at first. All in all it was definitely worth reading if you're looking for something scary and mysterious, but at over 400 pages with so much build up in the middle, it could've been a little shorter. The book also includes discussion questions at the end, which would be fitting for a YA book club.

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for free from Book Look for this review.  The opinion in this review is unbiased and reflects my honest judgment of the product.

Review: "Bradstreet Gate" by Robin Kirman

When a Harvard student Julie Patel is murdered, one of her professors, Storrow, falls to blame. The fact that he was dating a student, Georgia, was revealed through the investigation as well as through Georgia's jealous friend Alice's expose that she wrote following the murder. Beyond that, even students who had limited interaction with Storrow came forward with stories of interactions that seemed normal enough at the time, but odd in retrospect.

The novel is broken up into three parts: Harvard years, after Harvard, and ten years following the murder. The first section was excellent - full of suspense, mystery, and interesting characters. I was completely captivated and would've given the first section a five star rating. However, once I started the second section, things quickly went down hill. I kept expecting it to get better, but the characters' coincidental encounters just did not hold my interest. The book was screaming that the students had no reason to stay in touch after school, yet they kept going back to each other. By the third section, I couldn't wait for it to be over, since it was obvious nothing else would happen in the book.

If you're looking for a mystery that leaves you thinking "what just happened?" this might be it. I don't know how to interpret the ending, and it did not fulfil anything I was hoping to get from the conclusion of a mystery novel. If the first section hadn't been so good, the last two might not have seemed so bad, but at such a close comparison, I finished feeling very disappointed.

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for free from Blogging for Books for this review.  The opinion in this review is unbiased and reflects my honest judgment of the product.

Review: "The Day is Waiting" by Don Freeman and Linda Zuckerman

The Day is Waiting is a collection of illustrations by the late Don Freeman, author and illustrator of Corduroy books I enjoyed as a child. This book is full of images that published posthumously with text written by a close friend and colleague of Freeman's.

The illustrations are just as beautiful as I remember and it is a very nice collection covering a wide variety of subjects. My favorite is a goat standing on top of a hut. There's also a mouse in a suit of armour, a squirrel wearing a scarf, a bear riding a unicycle, and more than one page of penguins.

The story itself poses three questions: What do you see when you look outside? Where can you go on a fine, free day? and What can you do with the long, lazy hours? Each is answered by a few pages of short rhyming list of things.

There's not a lot of cohesiveness, which I was wondering about when I heard about this book. However, since the book is about finding joy and peace in the world around you and treasuring your home (the concluding sentence), the random pictures of things you could see, places you could go, and things you could do works out pretty well.

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for free from Book Look for this review.  The opinion in this review is unbiased and reflects my honest judgment of the product.

Review: "Princess Charity Sticker & Activity Book" inspired by Jeanna Young & Jacqueline Johnson, pictures by Omar Aranda

Princess Charity is part of a five-book sticker and activity book series titled The Princess Parables. Each 16-page book focuses on one of five sisters and Princess Charity is the youngest.

The activities are similar to the other Princess Parable books, but some types are unique to this book as well. Activities include: coloring, filling in stickers, word search, connect the dots, color by number, maze, find things that don't belong, spot the differences, drawing yourself as a princess, and drawing a kingdom. It's a handy little book of entertainment that would be perfect for vacations or waiting rooms.

The only problem with these books is that the 50 sticker insert is in the middle of the book, which is always a two-page spread photo. The stickers sheets would have to be pulled out of the book's staples so that the child doing the activity could see both sides at once.

The story line for Princess Charity leaves a bit to desire...There are short descriptions of what Princess Charity is doing and directions for activity. Most of them are very generic, about the princess, her sisters, and their father, but all of a sudden one page there's a Prince Jack without any introduction and then later he leaves the kingdom. It just seems weird in the limited story that it would focus on him leaving instead of arriving, since there was no prior mention of him. Maybe that was explained in Hope and Faith's books, since I haven't read those yet.

The story isn't terribly important though, especially with all of the great activities and stickers for children to play with. I would still heartily recommend this book.

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for free from Book Look for this review.  The opinion in this review is unbiased and reflects my honest judgment of the product.

Celebrating My 100th Blog Post with a Puppy Picture

In honor of my 100th blog post yesterday, here's my adorable dog with a pile of books that've been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read for ages! 

The woes of being a reader...so many books, so little time!

Review: "I Take You" by Eliza Kennedey

I Take You follows lawyer Lily Wilder in the week leading up to her wedding in Key West where she grew up. The only problem is, she can't decide whether or not she wants to get married. Her continued promiscuity with coworkers, men she meets at bars, and men from pretty much anywhere has her friends, family, and even herself a little concerned. The first third of the book is mostly about her partying, drinking, having sex, and doing drugs mostly as part of her bachelorette parties (she has three). She also seems unable to help her profane language, which comes out at the least opportune moments.

As if she didn't have enough going on trying to plan a wedding while thinking about whether or not she wanted to go through with it, her law firm also has her working on preparing a witness for a deposition. She quickly realizes she's out of her depth when she opens the file and sees some very incriminating emails that show her witness admitting to fraud.

Lily's fiance, Will, seems to be near perfect - an archaeologist who is absolutely head over heels for Lily, but also has a lot on his mind. They got engaged after only two weeks of knowing each other, and the wedding is just six months later. Do they know each other well enough to get married? That's the question that Will, Lily, and all of their family and friends wrestle with throughout the book.

It is a funny and captivating book in all of the crazy antics of Lily, her family, and everyone they encounter, though Lily is an endlessly frustrating narrator. She's outspoken, obnoxious, and continuously makes horrible life decisions that just make her terribly unlikable.  She is overly rude and often just plain mean. But she does learn from them and we do get to see character growth that leaves the novel with a satisfying conclusion and slightly minimizes the negative feelings toward the narrator.


It's definitely not for everyone, but I thought the story was interesting and I was very invested in seeing how it was resolved until the very last page.

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for free from Blogging for Books for this review.  The opinion in this review is unbiased and reflects my honest judgment of the product.