A review by dianet
The Golden Season by Madeline Kay Sneed

challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This book tackles some complex issues. What I loved about it is that it confronted those issues straight on without being overly judgmental of either Emmy or her parents. It made them real 3 dimensional people struggling with real problems instead of cliched characters. This book is not going to appeal to people that want to hate on any particular ideology. The ending was what bumped this up to 5 stars for me. It was left open ended and it was perfect. To top it all off, the prose is absolutely gorgeous.

These are my favorite 2 paragraphs of the entire book:

"When we focus on salvation - who gets saved and who gets damned - what we're really prioritizing is who is right and who is wrong," Pastor Sherman continued, taking her cue. "But we ignore what it means to be true. So instead of loving folks, we try to get them to see why they're wrong and why we're right." 

"We've fought wars because of this. We've justified stealing humans and their lands with this logic. And in our crusade - and I do not use that word lightly - to make the world right, we've lost the truth. Which is, simply, to love one another without condition, to the best of our conditional ability."