Book Reviews: The Waiting Place, Live Loved, Double Take, and Desert Gift

I will be posting another entry about platform next week, but today I want to give you the links to my July Faithful Reader reviews (www.faithfulreader.com). All 4 books I had the privilege to review this month were excellent. If I had to pick a favorite, though, it would be The Waiting Place by Eileen Button. Eileen is the very good friend of a very good friend of mine. This is her debut book by Thomas Nelson and it is fabulous!

Happy reading!

We all spend precious time just waiting. We wait in traffic, grocery store lines, and carpool circles. We wait to grow up, for true love, and for our children to be born. We even wait to die. But amazing things can happen if we open our eyes in The Waiting Place and peer into its dusty corners. Sometimes relationships are built, faith is discovered, dreams are (slowly) realized, and our hearts are expanded.

With humor and heart-breaking candor, Eileen Button breathes life into stagnant and, at times, difficult spaces. Throughout this collection of essays she contends that The Waiting Place can be a most miraculous place-a place where beauty can be experienced, the sacred can be realized, and God can be found working in the midst of it all.

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From the back cover:

It's spring break of her senior year and Madison Van Buren is fed up. Stressed over decisions on colleges, her parents' bickering, and pressures from her boyfriend, Madison gets in her car and just drives away.

Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Anna Fisher wants to escape the so-called simple life of the Amish--which for her consists of caring for younger children, sewing, cooking, and gardening--and she's well aware that her future will simply be more of the same with a man she doesn't love.

Worlds collide when Madison and Anna meet for the first time in a small town, realize they look uncannily alike, and decide the grass is greener on the other side. Neither of them will ever be the same.


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From the back cover:

When you’re at the top . . . you’ve got a long way to fall. A nationally known marriage expert, Jillian Galloway is at the pinnacle of success. Her syndicated talk radio show is a hit and her first book is about to release. But just as she’s leaving for her West Coast publicity tour, Jill’s faithful husband of twenty-four years drops a bombshell: he wants a divorce.

As her world crashes down around her, Jill flees to her parents’ home in the California desert, wondering if everything she’s built her career on—and everything she’s built her life around—is a sham. She thought she’d done everything right. So how did her marriage slowly slip away? And will she ever get it back?

From best-selling author Sally John comes an insightful and inspiring story about the unexpected detours our lives can take, the lies we sometimes tell ourselves, and the hope that God is always at work, even in the desert.

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Can you go wrong with a Max Lucado book? Don't think so. Here's a blurb about this devotional. Then click on the link for my full review.

Using the same popular format as Grace for the Moment, Live Loved brings fresh, new devotionals based on the writings of Max Lucado. Included is a broad range of topics such as facing your fears, accepting His grace, and truly knowing God's omnipresent love. Each devotional is accompanied by an ending prayer to nurture a stronger prayer life for new believers, as well as long-standing Christ followers. It's a new devotional from one of America's leading Christian writers that will help men and women experience life from a whole new perspective.

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