C.A. Gray's Blog, page 17
May 5, 2023
Always On My Mind, Beth Moran
Today’s podcast comes from this blog review of Always On My Mind.
The post Always On My Mind, Beth Moran appeared first on C.A. Gray.
May 3, 2023
Always On My Mind
Beth Moran books are always so uplifting and cozy, like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold day, or like a non-cheesy Hallmark movie. She doesn’t shy away from some of the “tough” issues in life (which is why they’re not cheesy). There are always a myriad of different kinds of relationships spanning the generations, which helps the main character to feel like they’re in a makeshift family, though often biological family is involved too. And things always turn out right in the end. There’s a satisfying happily-ever-after. Just my favorite kind of fictional escape.
This one threw me for a loop early on. It starts off when Jessie is in high school, which is younger than most of Beth Moran’s 20-something protagonists. She is going to prom with her twin brother Isaac, and his best friend Elliot, with whom Jessie is secretly in love–but her protective brother has forbidden any of his friends from pursuing a relationship with his twin. Nevertheless, Jessie and Elliot sneak off together, and she learns that he feels the same way. There’s a wonderful romantic moment, but they have to be careful not to be discovered, because Isaac doesn’t know yet. Elliot makes Jessie swear that she won’t tell Isaac anything until he’s had a chance to tell him himself. In a romantic haze, Elliot runs away, and doesn’t see the oncoming car.
That was the prologue. I assumed for a good chunk of the next chapter (10 years later) that Elliot had died, and if this were any other author with whom I had less experience, I might have stopped reading right then. I’m so glad I stuck with it, though. It turned out that Elliot didn’t die, but he did suffer a traumatic brain injury which meant that he had to relearn a lot of things, and continued to struggle with memory and emotional regulation. Jessie never did tell Isaac about that night, because she’d promised Elliot she wouldn’t–and also because, in her mind, the accident was all her fault. She’d distracted Elliot, and then he’d been hit, and as far as she was concerned, she’d ruined his life. She spent years in and out of therapy, feeling terribly guilty and hating herself, and thus never accomplishing much in her life. When the story resumes, she’s in a relationship with a guy whom she expects to marry, and he’s the first one who ever treated her decently because before, she had a tendency to pick losers (as women who dislike themselves often do). Seb isn’t great either, though, and before committing to her, he moves away for a summer to “find himself.” Jessie is down on her luck financially, and her brother Isaac invites her to move in with him and his roommates while Seb is away. She agrees because the price is right, only to discover that Isaac lives… with Elliot.
This of course brings up all kinds of complicated emotions for Jessie: guilt at first, but then as she realizes that Elliot has actually learned to be quite functional for the most part, attraction returns. Elliot is set for life from the settlement for the accident, so he spends his time coaching soccer for kids with various special needs, even though the team is terrible, and somehow Jessie becomes his assistant coach (because Elliot’s memory problems cause him to need help.) Her twin meanwhile has a history of being a player, but he’s fallen in love with a girl who has an autistic son, who happens to be on Elliot’s soccer team. The girl, Connie, knows Isaac’s reputation though, and won’t give him the time of day. The third roommate, Arthur, works at a funeral parlor, and he’s the exact kind of quirky nerd that I recall from many of my high school math and science AP classes: very socially inept, but in an endearing way. He, too, has fallen in love with a girl who also works at the funeral parlor, and knows he wants to marry her… but alas, never in his life has he ever made it past a first date. So the three boys agree to lower Jessie’s rent (which she really can’t afford) in exchange for making her their relationship coach–which they call the “Boys to Men Project.” Jessie agrees to this, but she feels like a fraud, since as far as she’s concerned, she’s never succeeded at anything herself.
Meanwhile, Jessie and Isaac’s parents run a retirement home, and they hire Jessie as their activities coordinator for the elderly who affectionately dub themselves “the outlaws.” There are a series of episodic hijinks there, too, as well as some touching moments as Jessie reconnects with Madeline, the elderly woman whom she worked for the summer after Elliot was injured.
The ending is just perfect. I can’t wait for Beth Moran’s next release.
My rating: *****
Language: none that I recall, but very little if any
Sexual content: none
Violence: none
Political content: none
The post Always On My Mind appeared first on C.A. Gray.
April 28, 2023
The Ice Age and the Flood, Jake Hebert
Today’s podcast comes from this blog review of The Ice Age and the Flood.
The post The Ice Age and the Flood, Jake Hebert appeared first on C.A. Gray.
April 27, 2023
The Ice Age and the Flood
I picked this one up mostly for research for an upcoming book, but the information is fascinating. I’m a Biblical creationist, but I never bothered to think much about the ice age and where it fit in that timeline. After reading Graham Hancock’s “Fingerprints of The Gods” I started to wonder about it, though, and found a YouTube video of Jake Hebert’s explanation of how a creationist explains the Ice Age. What I understood of that video was compelling, but there were bits I didn’t quite understand from the video, which is what led me to pick up this book.
In a nutshell, the book argues that secular scientists (who tend to be uniformitarians, or those who believe that history was very much like the present in terms of natural processes) don’t really have a good explanation for the ice age, and those explanations they do have depend upon minor variations of the earth’s orbit and tilt, which shouldn’t have been expected to have such a catastrophic global effect over the duration of time they claim it did. The dating methods they use to argue that the Ice Ages occurred millions of years ago also rely upon circular reasoning, using one rather arbitrary set of dates, massaged to arrive at the conclusion they want, in order to inform another. (Heber also discusses and refutes several of the very old dating arguments for ice cores in Greenland and in the arctic.)
Only the biblical creationist model can make use of the Noah’s flood, which sets up a catastrophic cycle of events which could easily have resulted in the Ice Age. Genesis tells us that in the flood, water didn’t just fall from the sky, but “the fountains of the deep” erupted, which would have released hot water warmed from the earth’s crust into the oceans, and also would have caused plate tectonic shifts and subsequent volcanic eruptions. The relatively warm and uniform temperatures of the oceans would have evaporated into the atmosphere, causing very humid conditions and subsequent significant precipitation in the years following the flood, while the volcanic ash would have blocked the sun’s rays from warming the earth as much as they usually do. Heber makes the point that this would have resulted in cooler summers, such that the snow which might fall from the high humidity in the winters wouldn’t be able to melt in the summertime, allowing ice sheets to advance. (Uniformitarians also agree that there were many volcanic eruptions in earth’s history, but their time scale requires that they would have occurred so far apart that they couldn’t make use of them to explain the ice age.) His arguments certainly seem compelling to me.
My rating: *****
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: none
Political content: none
The post The Ice Age and the Flood appeared first on C.A. Gray.
April 21, 2023
The Hidden Prince, Tessa Afshar
Today’s podcast review comes from this blog review of The Hidden Prince.
The post The Hidden Prince, Tessa Afshar appeared first on C.A. Gray.
April 19, 2023
The Hidden Prince
A wonderful, unique tale, despite the fact that this was Christian fiction (which I can rarely stand, for a variety of reasons).
I loved the historical setting of this one too: Keren is an impoverished Hebrew girl who lived during the days of the prophet Daniel toward the end of the time of Babylonian captivity. Her parents were forced to sell her into bondage, but they do so to Daniel’s own household. Keren has (very unusually for the time, for a woman) learned to become a scribe, and so she aids Daniel, while learning with some of his other apprentices. She eventually falls in love with Jared, a fellow learner, and we’re all set up to expect a stereotypical romance… but then there’s an extreme, and rather gruesome twist.
This twist forces Keren to flee for her life to the neighboring Media, where Keren becomes tutor to an enigmatic and endearing shepherd boy who turns out to be the future King Cyrus of what will one day be the Medo-Persian Empire–the very one whom, Keren knows as Daniel’s former scribe, was prophesied by the prophet Jeremiah to free the Jewish exiles to return to their homeland. Jared later comes back into Keren’s life, and together they must protect Cyrus from his paranoid grandfather, restoring him to his rightful position.
I was grateful for the afterword at the end, describing the author’s research into what is and isn’t known of Cyrus, as I found myself wondering as I listened where history ended and fiction began. My only complaint of the story was the prominence of the author’s very mainstream theological beliefs on the subject of God’s purpose in suffering, making God seem like the cause of it. This never fails to make me angry, as it seems like it’s slandering Him, making Him seem capricious and cruel, framing Him for crimes He didn’t commit. But most Christian fiction makes this a major theme of the entire story; in this one I could almost overlook it, since although it came up multiple times, no major plot points hinged upon that concept.
My rating: ****
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: present and there’s some graphic scenes, though not too much
Political content: none (though some of the the theological content is a bit revolting)
The post The Hidden Prince appeared first on C.A. Gray.
April 14, 2023
The Betrayed, Jeff Wheeler
Today’s podcast comes from this blog review of The Betrayed.
The post The Betrayed, Jeff Wheeler appeared first on C.A. Gray.
April 12, 2023
Think Like A Freak, Steven Dubner and Stephen Levitt
This week’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Think Like A Freak.
The post Think Like A Freak, Steven Dubner and Stephen Levitt appeared first on C.A. Gray.
Jesus Revolution by Greg Laurie and Ellen Vaughn
Today’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Jesus Revolution.
The post Jesus Revolution by Greg Laurie and Ellen Vaughn appeared first on C.A. Gray.
Because You Loved Me, Beth Moran
Today’s podcast comes from this blog review of Because You Loved Me.
The post Because You Loved Me, Beth Moran appeared first on C.A. Gray.
