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sarahetc 's review for:
Kisses from Katie
by Katie Davis
I feel like a heel for saying anything critical about this book. But I am going to be critical. Not of Katie, or her calling, or any of the beautiful, remarkable things that this book is about. As a work of nonfiction, I can do that here. I can hear the message while still being dissatisfied with the megaphone.
That said, this book got good in the last 20 pages. In the last third, maybe, there was a real sense of Katie as an actual human woman, an actual Old Mother Hubbard as she joked early on, who, although deeply, magnificently devoted to Christ, is still just one woman. One woman, with a team of children, a calling so big it's nearly incomprehensible and a bunch of about three pennies and a paper clip. Only in the last third did she come across as this human-- overwhelmed, bawling, snapping, angry, unbelieving, whipped, wiped-out and desperate. And the book was all the better for it. Her story of having to return one of her foster babies, whom she was in the process of adopting, was the first time I saw a real woman and a real mother. She writes of running into the backyard to catch the baby up, screaming for Jesus to help. And when the police car drives away with the child in custody, she talks about falling on her butt in the gravel, unable to move from grief. That's real. That's a person with real feelings, no matter how much she loves Jesus.
But prior to that, the book was very Brentwood Homecoming Queen Loves Jesus, Moves to Uganda. And I can say that, because I grew up in Brentwood, too. Bless Katie Davis, but she needs a new ghostwriter. She is following Jesus like few people now ever would. She is getting into Mother Teresa territory. But her ghostwriter seems to want her to concentrate on the massive contrast between Brentwood the Bubble and Uganda the Mission Field. The whole time I just kept wanting to hear more about her real feelings-- not what she expected people would expect her to feel. But her actual feelings. And they do not come through at all.
It's 120 pages of a co-ed screaming Onward Christian Soldiers (which is all well and good!) and 60 of a real woman and mother giving up everything to follow Christ. I hope there's more of the later where it came from.
That said, this book got good in the last 20 pages. In the last third, maybe, there was a real sense of Katie as an actual human woman, an actual Old Mother Hubbard as she joked early on, who, although deeply, magnificently devoted to Christ, is still just one woman. One woman, with a team of children, a calling so big it's nearly incomprehensible and a bunch of about three pennies and a paper clip. Only in the last third did she come across as this human-- overwhelmed, bawling, snapping, angry, unbelieving, whipped, wiped-out and desperate. And the book was all the better for it. Her story of having to return one of her foster babies, whom she was in the process of adopting, was the first time I saw a real woman and a real mother. She writes of running into the backyard to catch the baby up, screaming for Jesus to help. And when the police car drives away with the child in custody, she talks about falling on her butt in the gravel, unable to move from grief. That's real. That's a person with real feelings, no matter how much she loves Jesus.
But prior to that, the book was very Brentwood Homecoming Queen Loves Jesus, Moves to Uganda. And I can say that, because I grew up in Brentwood, too. Bless Katie Davis, but she needs a new ghostwriter. She is following Jesus like few people now ever would. She is getting into Mother Teresa territory. But her ghostwriter seems to want her to concentrate on the massive contrast between Brentwood the Bubble and Uganda the Mission Field. The whole time I just kept wanting to hear more about her real feelings-- not what she expected people would expect her to feel. But her actual feelings. And they do not come through at all.
It's 120 pages of a co-ed screaming Onward Christian Soldiers (which is all well and good!) and 60 of a real woman and mother giving up everything to follow Christ. I hope there's more of the later where it came from.