Patchwork: A Memoir of Love and Loss
Author: Mary Jo Doig
Publisher: She Writes Press
Publish Date: October 23, 2018
Paperback: 344 pages
ISBN: 9781631524493
About the Book:
Tightly wrapped in a lifelong protective cocoon, Mary Jo has no idea how wounded she is until one starless night following the death of a relative, she has a flashback that opens a dark passageway back to her childhood and the horrific secrets buried deep inside her. Like a needle stitching together a quilt, the memories she recovers reveal why she feels invisible, stupid, and different. Shattered by these revelations, overcome by depression, hopelessness, and a loss of trust in others, Mary Jo embarks on a healing journey through the underground of her life that ultimately leads to transformation.
My Thoughts:
When I first started reading this memoir, I felt like I was sitting in my living room with Mary Jo Doig and listening to her tell her story. I was captivated from the start and unlike many memoirs I have read, this one was truly interesting - like listening to your mother tell her life story. I picked my mother, because if she were alive, she would be almost the same age as the author.
Her story begins from childhood and this is told as she tells about her quilt that she has been working on. It's captivating and told so well - you feel an immediate connection with the author. As the story proceeds, one finds something is off, and as Mary Jo continues, you will find yourself holding your breath and possibly finding it so difficult to read, you'll have to set the book aside.
Mary Jo's journey to truth and healing is a powerful, powerful story. It will awaken feelings inside you and make you want to deal with those that had made her hit bottom and lose hope and trust. This woman is amazing and her story is well worth the read. Be warned it is difficult at times to get through and may even awaken old memories of friends and family members in your own past. Just know that when one hits bottom - there's only one way to go - UP - and that's what Mary Jo did.
Please note - This book contains abuse - sexual, mental and physical and may not be appropriate for younger audiences or those sensitive to this type of material.
About the Author:
Mary Jo Doig is a life-writing enthusiast who has been coaching women to tell their truth for twenty years. She is a book reviewer, editor, and facilitator of women’s writing circles and legacy workshops.
Her stories have been published in Inside and Out: Women’s Truths, Women’s Stories and Kitchen Table Stories. Mary Jo writes in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she treasures quilting, cooking healthy food, hiking with her rescue dogs, and spending time with family and friends.
Covenant Child
Author: Terri Blackstock
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN-13: 978-1401686970
Paperback: 336 pages
About the Book:
Amanda’s heart broke as she watched them drive her beloved twins away. She resolved to hope . . . and to fight for them to her last breath.
Kara and Lizzie are heiresses to one of the largest fortunes in the country. But when their father dies suddenly, the toddlers are ripped from the arms of Amanda, their loving stepmother, and given to their maternal grandparents, who only want the children’s fortune for themselves.
While even the stipend their guardians get for supporting them is squandered, the children are left to raise themselves. Kara and Lizzie grow up believing they are worthless . . . until the day when they learn the truth.
My Thoughts:
Gripping me from the first page, this book would have been devoured in one sitting if I had not had to tear myself away for other obligations. I just could not put it down! Terri Blackstock is a true master of storytelling and will keep the reader captivated from beginning to end. She had me gasping more than once at the realism of the abuse that Kara and Lizzie suffered - heartrendingly done by their own grandparents!
This novel has such a wonderful story line of unconditional love and forgiveness, although not apparent at first. As it unfolds, there is such a powerful message of unending love and faith. This book is going to be with me for a long, long time and comes highly recommended. This is one novel that should be on everyone's TBR list!
I received this book through the Booksneeze program. I was not required to write a positive review, but instead, one that gives my honest opinion.
The Taker
Author: Alma Katsu
Publisher: Gallery Books
Release Date: September 2011
Hardcover, 448 pages
ISBN: 9781439197059
True love can last an eternity . . . but immortality comes at a price. . . .
On the midnight shift at a hospital in rural Maine, Dr. Luke Findley is expecting another quiet evening of frostbite and the occasional domestic dispute. But the minute Lanore McIlvrae—Lanny—walks into his ER, she changes his life forever. A mysterious woman with a past and plenty of dark secrets, Lanny is unlike anyone Luke has ever met. He is inexplicably drawn to her . . . despite the fact that she is a murder suspect with a police escort. And as she begins to tell her story, a story of enduring love and consummate betrayal that transcends time and mortality, Luke finds himself utterly captivated.
Her impassioned account begins at the turn of the nineteenth century in the same small town of St. Andrew, Maine, back when it was a Puritan settlement. Consumed as a child by her love for the son of the town’s founder, Lanny will do anything to be with him forever. But the price she pays is steep—an immortal bond that chains her to a terrible fate for all eternity. And now, two centuries later, the key to her healing and her salvation lies with Dr. Luke Findley.
Part historical novel, part supernatural page-turner, The Taker is an unforgettable tale about the power of unrequited love not only to elevate and sustain, but also to blind and ultimately destroy, and how each of us is responsible for finding our own path to redemption.
My Thoughts:
Don't let the beautiful and serene looking cover full you. This mesmerizingly dark tale will grab you and haunt you long after you finish the book. Full of torment and torture of both mind and body, this story is full of horrific scenes - ones you really don't want to read, but can't pull your eyes away.
"The Taker" tells about a love so overpowering, so consuming, that the main character will do anything and risk anything to have what she wants. The risk is much greater than she'd ever realize, and it takes the reader on a journey to discover what love really is.
Although the ending was predictable, the road to get there was not! The paths this book followed were well beyond what I could have imagined. This book is one that I had to keep telling my husband about when I was reading it, so I imagine it would definitely be a book for book clubs/groups.
I must warn you - this is not for the squeamish or ones that are easily offended. Although not overly descriptive, there is enough to really put images in one's head. This book contains offensive language, sexual situations, rape, sodomy, abuse, child abuse, torture, and mental abuse. This is not one book I would hand my 18yo daughter.
About the Author:
Alma Katsu has a BA in Writing from Brandeis University (where she studied under John Irving) and an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Program. She lives with her husband in Virginia.
If you would like to find out more about Alma or her books, you can visit her online at: almakatsu.com/
This book was provided by Gallery Books for me to honestly review.
For Jamie Patterson, the end of her marriage is signaled by betrayal and abandonment. When estranged husband Ben asks to live with Jamie again, she ignores her instincts, her family's concern, and her friends' doubts and sets about making a perfect home in a California beach town.
What follows in 33-year-old Patterson's debut reads more like a mystery (or a horror story) than an account of a relationship ruptured by infidelity. As Jamie's carefully titrated efforts walk a tightrope between wishful fantasy and cruel reality, we watch: enraptured, enraged, and endeared by this fearless yet fragile young woman who must end one way of life to forge a new one.
My Thoughts:
This review took some time for me to write as the stark reality of this book hit very close to home. Jamie writes about the final weeks of her relationship with her husband and tells with both an innocence and purity of a soul that has been battered by emotional abuse. The lack of self-worth is apparent to the reader, but not to the person living it.
Jamie bares her soul and tells from a personal point of view how things transpired and how she discovered she lost herself, but only after losing her husband. She writes with a raw honesty and allows the reader inside the eyes of a person with no self-worth... a person who had it when she started, but doesn't realize that she no longer feels worthy of respect and real love. She shows a woman who feels that if she just tries harder and puts more effort in her relationship, she will receive the love from her husband that she so desperately craves.
This account illustrates how much emotional abuse breaks a person and how it robs their essence. Unlike physical abuse, the scars aren't apparent. The abuse isn't even apparent to the one on the receiving end until great damage has been done. Emotional abuse makes me think of the proverbial frog in the pot - it doesn't notice the heat is being turned up until it's too late.
This emotional account should be read by everyone!
Please Note:
Jamie will be donating a portion of her book sales to the Institute for Human Animal Connection at the University of Denver. After reading this book and meeting Huey, one will understand why.
About the Author:
Jamie Patterson is a writer, teacher, runner, and dog owner who has been writing since she was 9-years-old as the "kids corner" reporter for the Tangletown News in Minneapolis. Since then, she has written her way through life in four states and two continents and has completed four marathons. She is now an academic editor and lives in Minneapolis with her dog, Huey. This is her first book.
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
***Special thanks to Audra Jennings, Senior Media Specialist, The B&B Media Group for sending me a review copy.***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kimberly L. Smith is the president and cofounder of Make Way Partners, a mission organization committed to ending human trafficking. She is currently leading Make Way Partners to build the only private and indigenously based anti-trafficking network in Africa and Eastern Europe. A devoted wife, mother, and grandmother, Smith lives with her husband, Milton, in Sylacauga, Alabama.
Each one of us longs to know we matter. We hunger to know that we have purpose, our life has meaning, and God dreams great dreams for us. In Passport Through Darkness: A True Story of Danger and Second Chances, Kimberly Smith invites us into her own struggles as an ordinary woman who feels those aches, asks those questions, and stumbles through a quest to find her place in a broken world.
Traveling around the world and deep into the darkness of her own heart, Smith’s worst fears collided with her faith as she and her family discovered the atrocities of human trafficking. But in that broken place a self-centered life was transformed into an international effort to save thousands from modern-day slavery, persecution, disease, and genocide.
As Smith and her husband risk everything for orphans in Eastern Europe and Africa, they see God work again and again in impossible situations, especially in their own lives and marriage. They see God change them—even in their exhaustion, marital struggles, and physical limitations. They see the beauty of living out God’s dreams.
Product Details:
List Price: $14.99
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: David C. Cook (January 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 143470212X
ISBN-13: 978-1434702128
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
AT THE END OF ME
I stood at a precipice, a crag of rock in a parched, thirsty land that mirrored the condition of my heart. From where I stood, I looked down upon the riverbed that rendered the jagged cut reaching from the left corner of my mouth down to the bottom of my chin, and my right eye purplish black.
I recalled the day these marks came upon me and considered how many of the women I saw laboring in the current below who shared my experience. Fifty percent? Ninety percent? Had any woman been spared the hand-delivered scars of violence birthed in the tomb of this brutal, war-torn land?
Sickly cows wove around and between the women in the river. As the cows did their business in the water, some of the women bathed. Others washed rags they donned as clothing. Still others drew cans of drinking water from the soapy-feculent murkiness.
Taking stock of the last few months spent here at the border of Darfur, Sudan—the cusp of hell—I savored how God had knit these women into the fiber of my soul in ways that I’d never imagined possible back in the day of my corporate-ladder climbing. Love for them had changed my whole world. It had changed me. Now it was time for me to take what I’d been shown here back to my home in America with prayers that it, too, would be transformed.
My soul felt as restless and insecure as my feet did shuffling at the edge of the cliff.
A part of me felt so dark, lonely, and overwhelmed, I wanted to throw myself from the spire and be done with it. That would be the easy way, though, and my life had never seemed to be about finding the easy path. In fact, something in me seemed to like making life as difficult as possible.
A sprig of hope, a mite of faith encouraged me to stand down. Wait. Be expectant, but don’t jump. Pray. Help was surely around the corner.
Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) had promised to send someone to witness the persecution, rape, mutilation, and genocide I was documenting on the southern border of Darfur. Knowing it had taken me months of preparation, followed by endless fieldwork, to find and accurately record this data—information that I was still just beginning to comprehend—I didn’t see how I could possibly help the VOM rep to grasp it in just three days.
Sudan is the tenth-largest country in the world; the region of Darfur is the size of France. The southern half of Sudan has a grand total of about three miles of pavement. Darfur has none. The reality of war, insecurity, violence, and lack of infrastructure, combined with the fact that we had no vehicle to speed up our maneuvers, rendered the task of sufficiently covering the vast territory in such a short time frame all but impossible.
I wanted to make sure I would be able to adequately expose the VOM rep to the same kind of reality. To do that, I would need transportation to cover vast amounts of ground more quickly than walking would allow.
Late yesterday a brainstorm hit me. We’d ride donkeys! James Lual Atak, our indigenous director, laughed at my kawaidja (rich white person) notions, calling me a Sudanese wannabe. But he humored me. Since the VOM rep would be here in just a few days, early this morning he’d brought several donkeys to our camp so we could test-ride them before the rep arrived.
Always ready for action, I was the first to climb on. An old man we called Peterdit held the end of the rope tied around the neck of my donkey, which I’d named Blue. The sharp ridge of spine rising from Blue’s bare back cut into me in all the wrong places, and I squirmed to make a seat for myself.
Peterdit kept overenunciating two Arabic words for me, one for stop and one for faster. As Blue reared up, alternately kicking his hind legs and then his front legs high into the air, he let me know he wasn’t happy about my squirming on his backside.
Blue’s outburst jerked the rope from Peterdit’s grasp. Blue set off toward the village, bucking like a horizontal kangaroo.
In my hysteria I could only summon up one of the two words Peterdit taught me. I screamed it as firmly as I could, “Harach! Harach! Harach!” over and over again trying to make Blue obey my limited grasp of the Arabic language: “Stop!”
My head thrashed back and forth, and I flopped to Blue’s side, squeezing my legs around his girth as tightly as I could, while clinging to the frayed rope now burning the palm of my hands as it ripped through my fingers. As I blitzed by, I caught a glimpse of James laughing uproariously from atop his donkey, his long legs conveniently reaching his feet flat to the desert floor. At the time, I found no humor in Blue’s fit, or my condition!
After my whirlwind tour of the village via Blue’s conniption, Peterdit boldly stepped into Blue’s path and grabbed the rope flinging freely in the air as I clung to Blue’s short tuft of mane. He yelled a word I did not recognize in such force that the beast calmed himself, and I fell to the ground. Although my body would yell its trauma to me through deep musculature aches for many days, my only serious injury was to my pride.
Apparently the one Arabic word I had been yelling was not the word “Stop!” but rather “Faster, faster, faster!”
The comedy of my barebacked-donkey ride at this morning’s sunrise seemed a millennium away, and a stark contrast to the bleakness of what followed. As waves of heat swelled from the desert floor, I wrote off the whole donkey deal as another one of my romantic inclinations, and James and I opted to walk, not ride, to the death camp.
While there may be few good days in a death camp, this one was particularly brutal. We’d been out of medicine for a month, out of food for a week, and today, we ran out of water. All of those life giving commodities were gone, except for the private stash we kept at our compound for James and me, the kawaidja.
Although at home in the United States, people often thought of me as a poor missionary, I was coming to understand and grapple with the fact that I was, in reality, wealthy for simple things like never running out of water.
Up to this point in my life, what had I chosen to do with my riches? Standing on that cliff, I painfully acknowledged how I’d squandered so much of what God had given me, most painfully my entire life. Many times throughout this journey, this awakening, I have come perilously close to throwing it all away.
Through God’s grace, I slowly stepped down from the precipice and began to face the end of the me I’d created for myself. I wanted to live the life—be the me—He dreamed of.
I remembered a prayer I’d cried out many years before, begging Him to use me. I wondered, if I’d known where that prayer would lead, would I still have prayed it? Deciding the answer was yes, I uttered a new prayer: “You can have whatever You want from me, but please, God, just show me what difference one person can make in the darkness of this broken world.”
The following is His story, as lived through me to this point.
My Thoughts
This book was difficult for me to get through because of the emotional content. I found myself having to stop more than once because of a horrific story that was told. So many times it broke my heart knowing that others are out in the world suffering so.
This book needs to be read by all. It needs to be talked about and it points out that something needs to change. This is a powerful, powerful story that will leave everyone who has read it, changed. I know I cannot look at things the same way.
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
***Special thanks to Pam Mettler of Zondervan for sending me a review copy.***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nancy Rue has written over 100 books for girls, is the editor of the Faithgirlz Bible, and is a popular speaker and radio guest with her expertise in tween and teen issues. She and husband Jim have raised a daughter of their own and now live in Tennessee.
Do you remember the "ABC After School Special"? It was a program that dealt with real life situations that no one talked about. This book reminds me of that series. "Boyfriends, Burritos & an Ocean of Trouble" deals with teen relationship abuse - something that most of us don't even think about, let alone consider.
The main character, 15 year old Bryn O'Connor, dates her "dream guy" who ends up being the boyfriend from a nightmare. He's controlling and abusive but even worse, popular. When it comes to light Bryn is being abused by him, no one believes her and she walks from one nightmare into another.
This is a wonderful book that I would highly recommend giving to every teenage girl. Bryn is a wonderful role model, going from meek to a strong character. She learns about love, trust and taking risks, both in her physical and spiritual life.
If there is one book your teen needs to read this summer, this is the one!! It's not only well written and entertaining, but really has a powerful message about relationship abuse.
Book was supplied by FIRST for me to honestly review.
The Weight of Shadows
Author: Alison Strobel
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 9780310289456
Genre: fiction, Christian
About the Book: (from publisher)
In The Weight of Shadows, by Alison Strobel, after a difficult childhood, Kim has built a successful life for herself … but she'd leave it all if it meant being rid of the guilt she harbors over a tragic mistake she made years ago.
When she meets Rick, she finds everything she needs—including a way to pay for her sins every time he hits her. Kim and Rick’s new neighbor, Joshua, knows more than Kim realizes about Rick, but Joshua has battles of his own to fight. Soon to intersect Kim’s and Rick’s lives is Debbie, who has saved countless women from abuse through the shelter she runs, but Debbie might be as desperate for love as the women she serves.
Meanwhile, as Rick’s wrath extends to their baby, Kim must decide if her penance is more important than protecting that innocent life—and if she should dare leave Rick when he has the power to bring her hidden crime to light.
Get a SNEAK PEEK inside "The Weight of Shadows"....
"The Weight of Shadows" is an extremely well written book about domestic violence and abuse. Alison delicately, but truthfully, handles the subject and makes this a book that every female should read. Although it has some disturbing situations, this one is going to be required reading for my daughter. Abuse is not always seen by the person involved until it's too late, and this book points out those signs, while incorporating them into a gripping story.
This is a book I couldn't put down. It was painful to read at times, but still one that kept me captive until the very end. To deal with domestic abuse and to be able to crawl inside the head of a victim is a gift. Alison was blessed with that gift. Kim, the main character, felt real - too real. Many times, I wanted to save her, to shake her and have her wake up. It was difficult at times to sit behind the pages of the book, knowing that there was nothing I could do except go along for the ride. Hmmmm - just like the real thing.... Watching an abused woman until she decides it is time to get help.
I highly recommend this book to all females. I would suggest that parents read this before giving it to their teens. It is full of information that should be discussed between parents and their children. Knowing that abuse it not the victim's fault and that they never deserve it, may just prevent a potential problem in their future.
Parental note: Contains domestic abuse, violence, cutting, discussions of women wanting to kill their husbands and living together outside of marriage.
About the Author:
Alison Strobel writes novels that explore life, love and faith. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two daughters. Visit her at www.AlisonStrobel.com
