Your Questions Will Be Answered Here!

This is an extremely good read! If you've ever asked, "where was the church during the Holocaust?" or "how could any human being become Hitler's pawn and do such notrocious things?" then this book will more than enlighten you.

Hitler's Cross by Erwin W. Lutzer (he is on Christian radio alot these days) does an extremely thorough job of studying the times before, during and after the Holocaust and gives us an understanding of how good people fell for Hitler's lies, how the church got sucked in, and what present signs in our world today should we be alerted to.

Lutzer will lead you to introspect your own heart, and the heart of America as well. This is deffinitely one of the greats of our time. Everyone in our book club enjoyed this book and we couldn't talk enough on it.

Powerful and Inspiring

Finding Grace by Donna VanLiere

This book deals with so many things! Yes, it IS about 'grace,' but within that, it is about all those hard places where grace is needed so badly. Afterall, a life never escapes its valleys and painful scathings. We've all experienced "ungrace" as well and it hurts.

Finding Grace is one woman's story of some very personal valleys: broken dreams, child abuse, infertility, to name a few. She also gives much wisdom and guidance about hearing what your life is saying to you. I found it more than valuable.

A good suggestion when reading this inspiring book, is to make note, either on pad or your heart, of the many precious life-nuggets VanLiere shares with us becaue you will want to recall, apply, and pass them on. This book is that good!

A Tale of the Heart

Kate Morgenroth's new novel, Through the Heart, is a very different kind of love story. Or perhaps a very different kind of mystery. We witness the burgeoning romance between Timothy and Nora and their interactions with family and friends, knowing from the beginning that this story does not have a truly happy ending. We know that a murder will take place; we know when and where; but we don't have a clue whodunnit or who the unlucky victim is. The author does a great job of building interest in the relationship (you'll be rooting for Nora I think) and building suspense toward the awful climax (you'll be thinking, oh I hope the victim isn't this person or that person, or I hope so-and-so gets their due). Have fun with it, try to guess the ending, or just enjoy the ride. Morgenroth is one to watch.

Envisioning a Different World

It is obvious that novelist Laura Kasischke is also a poet. The writing in her new novel, In a Perfect World, is simply luminous. Here's the story: Jiselle, a beautiful, 30something flight attendant who has never married, is courted by handsome pilot Mark Dorn. After a brief and magical romance, with travel to numerous exotic locales, they wed. Jiselle leaves her career to stay home with Mark's three children. This is a sticky situation to be in under normal circumstances--teenage girls and a young boy still mourning their mother and resentful of the newcomer in their lives. But to make matters even more difficult, a flu pandemic spreads across the world, isolating Jiselle and the children in their community, while Mark is held in quarantine across the ocean. This story is a wonderful blending of an apocalyptic sort of plot, and a good character novel that really looks at how these people deal with each other and with the multiple crises affecting them. In the end, Jiselle and her stepchildren rise to the occasion and become a new and much stronger family, with a few surprises along the way.

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel's newest novel blends fact and fiction to tell the story of Henry the VIII's challenge to the church's power, when he was determined to make Anne Boleyn his queen. It is told from the eyes of Thomas Cromwell who rose from the gutter to become Henry's right hand man, taking the place of Cardinal Wolsey from whom he learned the tricks of his trade.
Cromwell changed the course of history by backing Henry's quest for Anne Boleyn and Henry's desire for absolute authority (which all kings and queens since, including Queen Elizabeth II subscribe to. He was a covert Protestant who protected other militant Protestants from Thomas More. His main goal was to help the common people which he thought could be achieved by destroying the Catholic clergy whom he despised and he wanted more limits on the power of the aristocracy, who despised him. He was also an administrative genius who transformed England from a fiefdom to a nation-state.
Mantel is able to bring all of these themes together by making us privy to Cromwell's every thought and calculation. Wolf Hall is the seat of the Seymour family clan where the goings-on symbolizes what Cromwell despised about the Catholic church.