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Joy’s Year In Books

Joy’s 2025 Year in Books

Take a look at Joy’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.

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Joy Jordan-Lake

Goodreads Author

Born

Washington, D.C., The United States

Website

http://www.joyjordanlake.com/

Twitter

joyjordanlake

Genre

Fiction, Nonfiction, Historical Fiction

Member Since

February 2011

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Joy Jordan-Lake's varied--and admittedly odd--professional experience has included working as a college professor, author, journalist, waitress, director of a program for homeless families, university chaplain, horseback riding instructor, free lance photographer, and --the job title that remains her personal favorite--head sailing instructor.

Born in Washington, D.C., Joy Jordan-Lake's first vivid childhood memory was watching her mother weep in front of the television, where newscasters were just reporting the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr. Later moving south with her family, she grew up on Signal Mountain, Tennessee, just outside Chattanooga, where she learned to observe the ways in which communities respond with courage to bigotry Joy Jordan-Lake's varied--and admittedly odd--professional experience has included working as a college professor, author, journalist, waitress, director of a program for homeless families, university chaplain, horseback riding instructor, free lance photographer, and --the job title that remains her personal favorite--head sailing instructor.

Born in Washington, D.C., Joy Jordan-Lake's first vivid childhood memory was watching her mother weep in front of the television, where newscasters were just reporting the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr. Later moving south with her family, she grew up on Signal Mountain, Tennessee, just outside Chattanooga, where she learned to observe the ways in which communities respond with courage to bigotry and violence--or fail to do so.

After earning a bachelors degree from Furman University and a masters from a theological seminary, Joy re-located to the Boston, Massachusetts, area where she earned a masters and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Tufts University, and specialized in the role of race in 19-century American fiction.

While in New England, she founded a food pantry targeting low-income and homeless families, served on the staff of a multi-ethnic church in Cambridge, worked as a free-lance journalist, and became a Baptist chaplain at Harvard. Her first book, Grit and Grace: Portraits of a Woman's Life (Harold Shaw Publishers, 1997), was a collection of stories, poems and essays which The Chicago Tribune described this way: "Written with much heart and wit, this little gem of a book touches on the ordinary and profound experiences that make up a woman's life . . . a poignant and satisfying collection . . . funny and sad, inspiring and awfully surprising."

Joy's second book, Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005) continued her doctoral dissertation work, exploring the inter-weavings of literature, theology, and race in American culture.

During this period, life for Joy and her husband, Todd Lake, was becoming increasingly chaotic with two careers, numerous re-locations for Todd's work, two young biological children and the adoption of a baby girl from China. Joy's nearly-manic need to ask everyone around her about how they managed--or not--to balance kids and career led to her third book, Working Families: Navigating the Demands and Delights of Marriage, Parenting and Career (WaterBrook/ Random House, 2007). Publishers Weekly called the book, "refreshing for its social conscience," and written with "sharp humor and snappy prose."

In its review of Joy's fourth book, Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous: Ten Alarming Words of Faith (Paraclete Press, 2007), Publishers Weekly again praised the author: "A professor at Belmont University and a former Baptist chaplain at Harvard University , the author mines her personal history...to illumine and interpret ideas such as...hope. Sometimes wry, occasionally stern, Jordan-Lake, with a touch of Southern gothic sensibility...has a gift for welcoming, lucid and insightful prose...."

Joy's first novel, Blue Hole Back Home, published in 2008 and inspired by actual events from her own teenage years, explores the tensions and eventual violence that erupt in a small, all-white Appalachian town when a Sri Lankan family moves in. Ultimately, Blue Hole Back Home, which bestselling author Leif Enger called "beautifully crafted," is a story not only of the devastating effects of racial hatred and cowardice, but more centrally, a celebration of courage, confrontation and healing. Used in a variety of classroom and book club settings, Blue Hole Back Home was chosen in 2009 as Baylor University's Common Book, and as the Common Book at Amarillo College in 2014.

Joy's latest novel, to be released in fall of 2017, is A Tangled Mercy. Told in alternating tales at once haunting and redemptive, A Tangled Mercy is a quintessentially American epic rooted in heartbr ...more

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Joy Jordan-Lake’s books

Average rating: 3.98 · 29,196 ratings · 2,934 reviews · 16 distinct works • Similar authors

	A Tangled Mercy 4.09 avg rating — 12,143 ratings — published 2017 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Under a Gilded Moon 3.81 avg rating — 12,557 ratings — published 2020 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Blue Hole Back Home 4.19 avg rating — 1,825 ratings — published 2008 — 17 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Bend of Light 4.03 avg rating — 969 ratings — published 2022 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Echoes of Us 4.37 avg rating — 766 ratings — published 2024 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Crazy-Much Love by Joy Jordan-Lake (Goodreads Author), Joy Jordan-Lake (Goodreads Author) 4.13 avg rating — 262 ratings — published 2019 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	All the Little Animals: A Bedtime Book from A-Z by Joy Jordan-Lake (Goodreads Author), Jane Chapman (illustrator) 4.57 avg rating — 90 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous: Ten Challenging Words of Faith 4.44 avg rating — 43 ratings — published 2007 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Working Families: Navigating the Demands and Delights of Marriage, Parenting, and Career 3.83 avg rating — 18 ratings — published 2007 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Grit and Grace: Portraits of a Woman's Life (Wheaton Literary Series) 4.75 avg rating — 12 ratings — published 2000 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Joy Jordan-Lake's Blog

Behind the story of A TANGLED MERCY

A Tangled Mercy
Joy Jordan-Lake
Dear fellow readers,

The below is from the Author's Note in my recently released novel A TANGLED MERCY. Some of you may have read this when you read the novel, or for others, this might be helpful background before you read it. Regardless, thank you for your time in sharing this journey with me, and as always, please feel free to tell me YOUR story...

SOME BACKGROUND O Read more of this blog post »

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Published on January 28, 2018 11:19 • Tags: a-tangled-mercy, charleston, clementa-pinckney, denmark-vesey, emanuel-ame, grimke, joy-jordan-lake, low-country, race, slave-revolt, south, southern-fiction, tom-russell, walter-scott

Joy is Currently Reading

Joy is currently reading

14 Fun Facts about the Rhine River: A 15-Minute Book (15-Minute Books 71)

by Jeannie Meekins

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Sep 07, 2025 06:00AM

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A Spool of Blue Thread

by Anne Tyler (Goodreads Author)

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Sep 07, 2025 05:59AM

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The Artist of Blackberry Grange

by Paulette Kennedy (Goodreads Author)

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Apr 24, 2025 08:07PM

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Quotes by Joy Jordan-Lake (?)

“A life worth living is one of compassion. And a life of compassion will include many tears.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

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“You've had a tough crack at life, I'll give you that. But you don't got to let the bad thrown at you become the ugly you think you got to be.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Blue Hole Back Home

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“You make sure you do something good with your life, you hear? Something that puts more beauty and more kindness into the world. And be a person of courage, my Kate. With a tender heart but a lot tougher hide.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

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Joy’s Quotes

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

tags: authors, childhood, humor, southern-authors, southern-writers, writing

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