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825 reviews
All We Thought We Knew by Michelle Shocklee
challenging
informative
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
“There are things you need to know. To understand. Our family… it isn’t what you’ve always believed.”
This book is a dual time period historical fiction that explores war-related challenges in both WWII and the Vietnam War.
I have some mixed feelings about this one. Overall I enjoyed reading it and it gave me some things to think about. However, after I finished it and was reflecting on the story I realized I felt a little underwhelmed. What I read was good, but I think I wanted a little bit more.
Also the ending wasn’t as dramatic as I was hoping for.
I have not really read anything set during (or about) the Vietnam War (The Women is on my TBR), so I really liked exploring that. It reminded me of the show This Is Us and the experiences for the brothers while they were in Vietnam and how it affected each of them differently. This story kinda taps into the controversy about America entering that war, but also about the soldiers coming home to an angry populace— a welcome that looked a little different than the soldiers in WWII.
I liked how Shocklee juxtaposes WWII and the Vietnam War. I think because I’m so far removed from both that I forget that so many people who were alive for the Vietnam War still remembered and held trauma from WWII and that had to have influenced how they viewed the Vietnam War.
Mattie Taylor is the main character in the 1969 time period and I must say she is not super likeable. After news that her mother is dying of cancer she returns home to the horse farm in Tennessee. She had abruptly left the year prior after her twin brother died in Vietnam, angry at her parents for letting him enlist. She spent the year living the hippie, free love and drugs lifestyle in California, trying to mask the pain of her loss.
Now that she’s home her anger has not subsided but has now been leveled up as she accuses her father of not caring about her mother’s health. Mattie is determined that there is more to be done to save her mother from the cancer.
There is also the character of Nash, (who was probably my favorite and I would have loved to have more of his story in it) who has become a farmhand for Mattie’s dad in her absence. He went to Vietnam with Mattie’s twin and his best friend, Mark. Nash lives with his own survivor’s guilt and an amputated arm to remind him of what he lost in the war. Part of the character development in this book is Mattie’s attitude towards Nash, which at first is the familiar anger we have come to associate with her.
In all of this, it’s evident from the start that Mattie needs to get off her high horse. Pun intended.
The other time period (1942) revolves around the character Ava Delaney (of Delaney Horse Farms) who has just lost her husband (of a few weeks) in the attack at Pearl Harbor. With nowhere to go she lives with her bitter mother-in-law on the horse farm in Tennessee. She ends up getting a job at the military base, Camp Forrest (historically accurate and interesting to read more about), where she comes into contact with internees— civilians detained just because they were of German, Japanese, or Italian descent.
She develops a relationship with one particular German internee— Gunther— as she helps him improve his English.
The title of this book is what draws these two time periods together— All We Thought We Knew.
Both Ava and Mattie think they know something about the war or about the prisoners or about the soldiers or for Mattie- about their family, but as the story progresses they realize they may have gotten some things wrong. Perhaps not all Germans detained are like Hitler. Perhaps the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War should still be heralded as heroic even if America’s involvement was a mistake. Perhaps wars are still necessary even if they aren’t good.
This leads me to probably the main reason I felt underwhelmed by this book. There is a lot of build up to this family secret that Mattie’s mom wants her to know. The WWII timeline holds the clues.
But once the big reveal is made, instead of the splash of a boulder hitting the water, it is like the blip of a pebble. The payoff from the build up was disproportionate.
I would have liked to see some more drama as the timelines converge.
The Problem of Evil
Another aspect of this story is Mattie’s struggle with the goodness of God and the evil in the world.
“I can’t believe in a God who would fill your body with a vile disease and then sit back and do nothing to help. I won’t believe in a God who let my brother die a horrific death, fighting a horrific war that should have never happened.”
“I couldn’t blindly believe, I needed logical answers.”
Shocklee uses Mattie’s character to touch on this very common objection to Christianity— If God exists, how do we explain the evil in the world? If God exists either he isn’t good because he doesn’t stop the evil or he can’t because he isn’t powerful enough.
To her credit, Shocklee does point to the cross where we see evidence that whatever happens to us that we can’t explain, we can see Jesus’ sacrifice for us, his entering into a broken world to experience suffering and death, and know that it’s not because he doesn’t love us.
If I had been writing the book I think I would have spent more time answering Mattie’s questions, but Shocklee chose to be more subtle and to allow the reader to do more work as they work through their own struggles. I’m sure there are readers who were already flinching at the ‘God stuff’ in the book and would not have liked any further apologetics, but I say- if you’re going to go there, go all in.
So I’ll offer a few things that were not in the book as a way of defense:
In his book Why Believe? Neil Shenvi mentions C.S. Lewis’s quote as he reflects on his experience as an atheist: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”
The argument of evil is actually evidence FOR the existence of God. If there is no objective good or evil then how can you argue that evil exists without God? If there is objective good or evil, then where does it come from? Furthermore, knowing my own propensity to be selfish and choose things that only benefit myself, the fact that the world is not completely destroyed by human evilness, that there is any good in the world at all is evidence that God exists, restraining evil however much he sees fit and transforming hearts to desire what is good when before there was only selfishness.
Another important point is that if we think a good God would never allow evil, we are operating out of an assumption that God’s ultimate goal for his people is their happiness. But that is not true. His goal for us is knowledge of him that leads to true and eternal life.
Shenvi says, “If God is less interested in our physical comfort and more interested in producing in us a certain kind of character, then it makes much more sense that we face trials, hardships, and suffering that can produce in us forbearance, bravery, mercy, and compassion.”
Of course there are certain evils that don’t seem to fit into this explanation and so logically we come to place where we have to acknowledge— there is a difference between saying ‘I see no good reason for this evil’ and saying ‘There are no good reasons for this evil.’ Is it possible that if an all-knowing and all-powerful God could stop evil, it’s also possible God is doing it for reasons we don’t understand?
Lastly, we know that God’s ultimate goal is to bring glory to himself. Humans exist to that end. When we find joy in him, it brings glory to him, but we also bring glory to him when we see the fullness of his character— his mercy AND his justice.
“Evil can remain evil and yet can permit two great goods that would otherwise be impossible: the display of God’s mercy to sinners and the display of God’s judgment on sin.”
Much has been written on this and if you’re struggling with this seeming dichotomy of evil and a good God, I would highly encourage you to explore more because there is peace and comfort and truth to be had.
Here is a podcast, an article, this video and ones like it, and this list of relevant articles to start.
Recommendation
If you enjoy historical fiction books, I think you’ll mostly enjoy this one. In my mind the historical fiction genre is not about explosive secrets and big reveals as much as the thriller genre so what let me down could very well have been wrong expectations and you may not be super miffed about it.
Overall, it reads fairly fast and the setting of the story was interesting to read about.
Based on my reviews of most of the historical fiction I’ve read this year, I think I’m still exploring what it takes to be a five star historical fiction read for me and I’d hate to skew your interest in this book just because I want my history to be more surprising.
I also do appreciate that Shocklee included the very real human struggle we have with evil in the world and I think the Vietnam War setting along with the cancer diagnosis was a good ‘storm’ to introduce it and I hope readers contemplate and explore how we can answer that.
So yes, I would loosely recommend this book but it’s not going to knock your socks off.
**Received a copy via Tyndale in exchange for an honest review**
This book is a dual time period historical fiction that explores war-related challenges in both WWII and the Vietnam War.
I have some mixed feelings about this one. Overall I enjoyed reading it and it gave me some things to think about. However, after I finished it and was reflecting on the story I realized I felt a little underwhelmed. What I read was good, but I think I wanted a little bit more.
Also the ending wasn’t as dramatic as I was hoping for.
I have not really read anything set during (or about) the Vietnam War (The Women is on my TBR), so I really liked exploring that. It reminded me of the show This Is Us and the experiences for the brothers while they were in Vietnam and how it affected each of them differently. This story kinda taps into the controversy about America entering that war, but also about the soldiers coming home to an angry populace— a welcome that looked a little different than the soldiers in WWII.
I liked how Shocklee juxtaposes WWII and the Vietnam War. I think because I’m so far removed from both that I forget that so many people who were alive for the Vietnam War still remembered and held trauma from WWII and that had to have influenced how they viewed the Vietnam War.
Mattie Taylor is the main character in the 1969 time period and I must say she is not super likeable. After news that her mother is dying of cancer she returns home to the horse farm in Tennessee. She had abruptly left the year prior after her twin brother died in Vietnam, angry at her parents for letting him enlist. She spent the year living the hippie, free love and drugs lifestyle in California, trying to mask the pain of her loss.
Now that she’s home her anger has not subsided but has now been leveled up as she accuses her father of not caring about her mother’s health. Mattie is determined that there is more to be done to save her mother from the cancer.
There is also the character of Nash, (who was probably my favorite and I would have loved to have more of his story in it) who has become a farmhand for Mattie’s dad in her absence. He went to Vietnam with Mattie’s twin and his best friend, Mark. Nash lives with his own survivor’s guilt and an amputated arm to remind him of what he lost in the war. Part of the character development in this book is Mattie’s attitude towards Nash, which at first is the familiar anger we have come to associate with her.
In all of this, it’s evident from the start that Mattie needs to get off her high horse. Pun intended.
The other time period (1942) revolves around the character Ava Delaney (of Delaney Horse Farms) who has just lost her husband (of a few weeks) in the attack at Pearl Harbor. With nowhere to go she lives with her bitter mother-in-law on the horse farm in Tennessee. She ends up getting a job at the military base, Camp Forrest (historically accurate and interesting to read more about), where she comes into contact with internees— civilians detained just because they were of German, Japanese, or Italian descent.
She develops a relationship with one particular German internee— Gunther— as she helps him improve his English.
The title of this book is what draws these two time periods together— All We Thought We Knew.
Both Ava and Mattie think they know something about the war or about the prisoners or about the soldiers or for Mattie- about their family, but as the story progresses they realize they may have gotten some things wrong. Perhaps not all Germans detained are like Hitler. Perhaps the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War should still be heralded as heroic even if America’s involvement was a mistake. Perhaps wars are still necessary even if they aren’t good.
This leads me to probably the main reason I felt underwhelmed by this book. There is a lot of build up to this family secret that Mattie’s mom wants her to know. The WWII timeline holds the clues.
But once the big reveal is made, instead of the splash of a boulder hitting the water, it is like the blip of a pebble. The payoff from the build up was disproportionate.
I would have liked to see some more drama as the timelines converge.
The Problem of Evil
Another aspect of this story is Mattie’s struggle with the goodness of God and the evil in the world.
“I can’t believe in a God who would fill your body with a vile disease and then sit back and do nothing to help. I won’t believe in a God who let my brother die a horrific death, fighting a horrific war that should have never happened.”
“I couldn’t blindly believe, I needed logical answers.”
Shocklee uses Mattie’s character to touch on this very common objection to Christianity— If God exists, how do we explain the evil in the world? If God exists either he isn’t good because he doesn’t stop the evil or he can’t because he isn’t powerful enough.
To her credit, Shocklee does point to the cross where we see evidence that whatever happens to us that we can’t explain, we can see Jesus’ sacrifice for us, his entering into a broken world to experience suffering and death, and know that it’s not because he doesn’t love us.
If I had been writing the book I think I would have spent more time answering Mattie’s questions, but Shocklee chose to be more subtle and to allow the reader to do more work as they work through their own struggles. I’m sure there are readers who were already flinching at the ‘God stuff’ in the book and would not have liked any further apologetics, but I say- if you’re going to go there, go all in.
So I’ll offer a few things that were not in the book as a way of defense:
In his book Why Believe? Neil Shenvi mentions C.S. Lewis’s quote as he reflects on his experience as an atheist: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”
The argument of evil is actually evidence FOR the existence of God. If there is no objective good or evil then how can you argue that evil exists without God? If there is objective good or evil, then where does it come from? Furthermore, knowing my own propensity to be selfish and choose things that only benefit myself, the fact that the world is not completely destroyed by human evilness, that there is any good in the world at all is evidence that God exists, restraining evil however much he sees fit and transforming hearts to desire what is good when before there was only selfishness.
Another important point is that if we think a good God would never allow evil, we are operating out of an assumption that God’s ultimate goal for his people is their happiness. But that is not true. His goal for us is knowledge of him that leads to true and eternal life.
Shenvi says, “If God is less interested in our physical comfort and more interested in producing in us a certain kind of character, then it makes much more sense that we face trials, hardships, and suffering that can produce in us forbearance, bravery, mercy, and compassion.”
Of course there are certain evils that don’t seem to fit into this explanation and so logically we come to place where we have to acknowledge— there is a difference between saying ‘I see no good reason for this evil’ and saying ‘There are no good reasons for this evil.’ Is it possible that if an all-knowing and all-powerful God could stop evil, it’s also possible God is doing it for reasons we don’t understand?
Lastly, we know that God’s ultimate goal is to bring glory to himself. Humans exist to that end. When we find joy in him, it brings glory to him, but we also bring glory to him when we see the fullness of his character— his mercy AND his justice.
“Evil can remain evil and yet can permit two great goods that would otherwise be impossible: the display of God’s mercy to sinners and the display of God’s judgment on sin.”
Much has been written on this and if you’re struggling with this seeming dichotomy of evil and a good God, I would highly encourage you to explore more because there is peace and comfort and truth to be had.
Here is a podcast, an article, this video and ones like it, and this list of relevant articles to start.
Recommendation
If you enjoy historical fiction books, I think you’ll mostly enjoy this one. In my mind the historical fiction genre is not about explosive secrets and big reveals as much as the thriller genre so what let me down could very well have been wrong expectations and you may not be super miffed about it.
Overall, it reads fairly fast and the setting of the story was interesting to read about.
Based on my reviews of most of the historical fiction I’ve read this year, I think I’m still exploring what it takes to be a five star historical fiction read for me and I’d hate to skew your interest in this book just because I want my history to be more surprising.
I also do appreciate that Shocklee included the very real human struggle we have with evil in the world and I think the Vietnam War setting along with the cancer diagnosis was a good ‘storm’ to introduce it and I hope readers contemplate and explore how we can answer that.
So yes, I would loosely recommend this book but it’s not going to knock your socks off.
**Received a copy via Tyndale in exchange for an honest review**
Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in Our Walk with God by J.I. Packer
Recommendation
I know there was a lot in this review, but I hope it inspires you to give the book a chance. Read it in a group if it will help to put several minds together to grasp what’s going on (I made my dad book club this book with me and it helped a lot!).
It’s true that the inner life is neglected and we’ve been running around with an improper theology of holiness and sinlessness. These things are worth thinking about. We don’t want a smudgy view of Christ or his Spirit, do we?
Packer admonishes that we can’t just say, “Let’s be different!” because “that’s a principle of reaction, and reaction rarely works righteousness.” That’s where the pendulum starts swinging. We need to be thoughtful about what we’re doing and where we’re going, aligning with God’s Word and command.
Let Packer bring some clarity for you. Let him also challenge your church- charismatic or not- to consider how your practices do or do not honor the Spirit. Whether you need to seek more solid theology or to worship with more emotion and heart, be open to the Holy Spirit at work in your life.
challenging
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
5.0
“If you were accused of honoring the Holy Spirit, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”
[This is a shortened review- the full review can be found HERE]
Lots to glean from these pages as is typical of Packer’s books! Definitely one that would benefit from multiple readings if you can.
Unfortunately, I think that this book may not be as accessible as some of his others like Knowing God. I think many that begin to read might not stick with it. It’s definitely one you can’t read distracted. Even when I was really focused there were parts that I had to reread a few times to grasp.
Hopefully this review can help those who wish to read it— offer some framework and highlight some of his main points you can filter the book through. I also think that a pastoral take and consideration of this book will differ from a lay person’s view because pastors have had to navigate congregations of members with different views that lay people may not even be aware of.
I was really interested in what he said about charismatic practices as I’ve been skeptical of a lot of things. Packer affirmed some of my caution but also offered insights that helped me to think about those things in a different way.
Even though he addresses some highly divisive things, I don’t think this book made him any enemies. He approaches each view in a balanced way, acknowledging the strengths and weaknesses or vulnerabilities of each.
I will also say here that the book is full of Bible references to support all that he says; I didn’t include all of them throughout my review but want readers to know that this is a book written from reading out of the Bible not into the Bible.
The book I read was a re-print of the 2005 revision. The original was written in 1984 as a response to the charismatic ‘tidal wave’ that came across in Britain in the 1960s. There became divisions about what the ‘main role’ of the Spirit was as different groups focused on different aspects of the Spirit’s work and how to understand things like the gifts of the Spirit and speaking in tongues.
Packer said that he wrote this book to do four things:
1) restate the Christ-centered news of the Holy Spirit’s new covenant ministry, to counter the spiritual Spirit-centered news that was spreading
2) reaffirm the biblical call to holiness, in the face of the distortions and neglect from which it had long suffered
3) assess the charismatic movement and its claims even-handedly
4) show that in any case the charismatic vision falls short of the fullness of revival according to the Scriptures, so that however grateful for this movement we may be we must look beyond it.
Part One
“What is the essence, heart, and core of the Spirit’s work today?”
Packer describes several camps of thought, however subtle, that emphasize different aspects of the Spirit’s work. He first shows how these are all founded on a biblical basis of truth and all have importance in terms of how we look at the Spirit, but when we overfocus or take them beyond where they were meant to go it can turn into bad theology.
Power: “giving the ability to do what you know you ought to do and indeed want to do, but feel that you lack the strength for” [Keswick teaching falls here]
the critique: “To start with, it blurs the distinction between manipulating divine power at one’s own will (which is magic) and experiencing it as one obeys God’s will (which is religion).”
Performance: “exercising spiritual gifts… preaching, teaching, prophecy, tongues, healing”
the critique: “any mindset which treats the Spirit’s gifts (ability and willingness to run around and do things) as more important than his fruit (Christlike character in personal life) is spiritually wrongheaded and needs correcting.”
Purification: “cleansing his children from sin’s defilement and pollution by enabling them to resist temptation and do what is right.”
the critique: “Their tendency is to grow legalistic, making tight rules for themselves and others about abstaining from things indifferent, imposing rigid and restrictive behavior patterns as bulwarks against worldliness and attaching great importance to observing these man-made taboos.”
Presentation: “making us aware of things” [Bishop J.V. Taylor]
the critique: “it takes more to constitute real, valid saving knowledge of Jesus than simply being able to mouth his name… knowledge of Christ must be measured, among other texts, by how much of the New Testament teaching about Christ is or is not embraced.”
So while none of these are entirely wrong, imbalances in our thinking creates what he calls a “smudgy” understanding about the Spirit and can thus stifle His ability to work in our lives.
Packer offers a way of looking at the Spirit’s work in a more unified way. He calls it: Presence.
“The distinctive, constant, basic ministry of the Holy Spirit under the new covenant is so to mediate Christ’s presence to believers— that is, to give them such knowledge of his presence with them as their Savior, Lord, and God.”
Then it would follow that we would grow in fellowship with Jesus, be transformed to look more like Christ, and have assurance that we are loved, redeemed, and adopted into his family, encompassing all the other focuses listed above.
Another way to look at it is this:
“It is as if the Spirit stands behind us, throwing light over our shoulder, on Jesus, who stands facing us… The Spirit, we might say, is the matchmaker, the celestial marriage broker, whose role it is to bring us and Christ together and ensure that we stay together.”
Part Two
There are four chapters called ‘Mapping the Spirit’s Path’ that talk about holiness and the charismatic life.
“The pursuit of holiness is… a vital element in Christian mission strategy today. The world’s greatest need is the personal holiness of Christian people.”
He defines holiness as:
“Holiness is in essence obeying God, living to God and for God, imitating God, keeping his law, taking his side against sin, doing righteousness, performing good works, following Christ’s teaching and example, worshiping God in the Spirit, loving and serving God and men out of reverence for Christ.”
He critiques evangelicals for making holiness secondary. Saying we’ve become too busy in activism with little regard for our ‘inner lives’ just like the Pharisees.
He then goes through the principles of holiness (i.e. the nature, the context, the root, the agent, experience, rule, and heart of holiness)
One of the things he talks about that stuck out to me in this part was in regards to repentance: “Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged.”
I also liked how he said that one of the ways by which the Spirit works in our lives is through helping us form holy habits. This is the counter to the ‘let go and let God’ approach and recognizes that the Spirit works through naturally formed habits and it doesn’t always (or usually) have to be a supernatural ‘spiritual experience’ to see the Spirit working.
He spends a chapter here discussing three views of holiness concerning the question- How do we achieve holiness?
I’ll try to make this part brief; it’s obviously more detailed in the book.
The Augustinian view, held by Lutheran and Reformed teachers (Calvin, Owen, Ryle), is based on the principle “that God out of grace (meaning, free, unmerited love to us sinners) and by grace (meaning the Spirit active in our personal lives) must and does work in us all that we ever achieve of the faith, hope, love, worship, and obedience that he requires… God gives what he commands.”
This view emphasizes humility in that we know we are sinful and cannot do anything good on our own, activity in that we must be zealous for good works doing all we can, and change in that we should expect to see transformation even as we acknowledge the daily struggle and failures.
It could be summarized by Phil. 2:12-13 which says- “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
The Wesleyan Perfectionism view holds that there is a second work of grace, post-conversion, in which “all sinful motivation is rooted out of a Christian’s heart.” and comes from teachings of John Wesley— also held by John Fletcher, William Booth, and Oswald Chambers— that actually may have been misinterpreted because of Wesley’s use of the word ‘perfection’. Packer thinks the term ‘total love’ would make more sense for this belief.
This view focuses on love of God and love for others as evidence of this second act of grace where we no longer desire to sin because we are so overcome by the love of God towards us; any sin you commit going forward would be involuntary because you would no longer voluntarily sin because of how much you love God. However, there is no biblical grounds to be confident that God would bestow that kind of transformation this side of heaven, indeed, our own reality and experiences shows us that sin is always creeping at the door. This view also creates uncertainty for Christians who can never seem to be ‘perfect.’
The Keswick teaching is similar to Wesleyan Perfectionism in that they both uphold a belief about attaining sinlessness on Earth. However, Keswick teaching denies human ability to do it. In this view it’s about ‘letting go and letting God’, trusting and having faith that God will keep you from sin. You still remove voluntary sin from your life but through a passive yielding to the Spirit to attain it.
One of the critiques of this view is their use of Paul’s words on ‘surrender.’ [Rom 6:13; 12:1] Packer says surrender here “is not meaning we lapse into inaction but rather that we should report for duty and set no limits to what Christ by his spirit through his Word may direct us to do.” We are not called to be passive, waiting for the Holy Spirit to pop up and change us, but that we are to “resolutely labor by prayer and effort to obey the law of Christ and mortify sin.”
Packer acknowledges that the draw for the Wesleyan and Keswick views is that these views attempt to encourage real hearts that struggle with the ongoing battle of sin and our desire to be free from it and victorious over it. Yet, the reality is that sin still dwells in our hearts and the sanctification process requires an ongoing battle, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to continue to resist temptation and to obey Christ’s teachings, until our promised glorification after this life.
Some might argue that they’ve seen or experienced lives changed by the Wesleyan or Keswick teaching and so doesn’t that mean something? Packer replies that 1) many might not actually get the complete teaching of that particular view but just an understanding of faith in Jesus and his power working in our lives and that 2) “God is very gracious and truly gives himself to all who truly seek him, never mind whether their theology is good or not so good.”
So then does any of this “justify the inaccuracies” of the teachings?
He says: “No. It is not much of a recommendation when all you can say is that this teaching may help you if you do not take its details too seriously… [and] if you do take its details seriously, it will tend not to help you but to destroy you.”
The details of our theology matter. He likens it to car parts being recalled for being faulty. Sure you may be able to drive, but would you want to be driving around in a car with a defective part? Pastorally, defective theology needs to be recalled and corrected.
Charismatic practices/beliefs can often be divisive in churches. What spiritual gifts should we expect to see today? Can/should people speak in tongues? What should worship look like? What should conversion feel like? What should we think about charismatic prophesying?
These are the questions Packer delves into and I can’t go into it all here— especially the speaking in tongues and prophesying parts as I believe his arguments are probably best read within the context of his entire book in detail.
While Packer does have some critiques of the charismatic movement, he spends time listing twelve positive aspects of it including Christ-centeredness, joyfulness, prayerfulness, communal living, and generous giving.
“No type of Christian spirituality is free from dangers, weaknesses, and threats to maturity arising from its very strengths, and it is not as if Christian maturity were overwhelmingly visible in non charismatic circles today.”
He challenges non-charismatic churches to learn from charismatics by being more exuberant and joyful in their worship, not to be passive and relying on their pastors to ‘do everything’ but to be active and fervent in prayer, using our gifts to serve, and being more open to the power of the Spirit at work in their lives. To seek to encourage congregation members to find a role to play in the church instead of being a consumer.
He admonishes any church that feels vindicated that they don’t have the ‘Corinthian’ problem and I agree that a lot of churches should be less orderly if it means the Spirit has risen them up!
“If our reaction as readers is merely to preen ourselves and feel glad because our churches are free from Corinthian disorders, we are fools indeed. The Corinthian disorders were due to an uncontrolled overflow of Holy Spirit life. Many churches today are orderly simply because they are asleep, and with some one fears that it is the sleep of death. It is no great thing to have order in a cemetery!”
He challenges charismatic churches to be more committed to seeking solid theology and a biblical basis for all that they do, to focus less on performance which often creates group pressure to conform in physical and emotional experience, and to be less focused on man-centered or supernatural experiences and more open to God working in the natural.
As for the gifts of tongues, prophesying, and healing, Packer provides biblical arguments for how what is practiced today cannot be convincingly viewed as a ‘restoration’ of what was practiced in Scripture by the apostles. However, he doesn’t necessarily condemn their practice.
For example, of glossolalia (tongues), he says:
“It is often urged that since God’s goal is full integration of the individual under fully self-conscious, rational control, the overall pattern of ongoing sanctification must involve steady recovery of such control as we move deeper into what Scripture calls sincerity simplicity, and single mindedness (Phil 3:13, 2 Cor 11:3, James 1:7-8) In that case, there can be no place for glossolalia, in which rational control of the vocal chords is given up BUT … it does not seem inconceivable that the Spirit might prompt this relaxation of rational control at surface level in order to strengthen control at a deeper level… In this way glossolalia could be a good gift of God for some people at least, on the basis that anything that helps you to concentrate on God, practice his presence, and open yourself to his influence is a good gift.”
You can find his nine conclusions for these things on pg 269-276 (end of Chapter 6).
Generally speaking, Packer applies both a credal and a moral test for the charismatic movement and finds the best practicers of this movement to be aligned with a right theology of the Incarnate Son (credal) and to have a desire to obey God’s commands, avoid sin, and love others (moral).
He reminds us that you don’t have to have perfect theology to experience God in a real way. That is true. Yet, we should be applying these two tests to anything we encounter because not all charismatic churches or experiences fall under ‘best practices.’ We should always be checking beliefs and practices against Scripture in any church we attend and make sure to give God’s Word supremacy over experience because He is our authority in his revealed Word.
[This is a shortened review- the full review can be found HERE]
Lots to glean from these pages as is typical of Packer’s books! Definitely one that would benefit from multiple readings if you can.
Unfortunately, I think that this book may not be as accessible as some of his others like Knowing God. I think many that begin to read might not stick with it. It’s definitely one you can’t read distracted. Even when I was really focused there were parts that I had to reread a few times to grasp.
Hopefully this review can help those who wish to read it— offer some framework and highlight some of his main points you can filter the book through. I also think that a pastoral take and consideration of this book will differ from a lay person’s view because pastors have had to navigate congregations of members with different views that lay people may not even be aware of.
I was really interested in what he said about charismatic practices as I’ve been skeptical of a lot of things. Packer affirmed some of my caution but also offered insights that helped me to think about those things in a different way.
Even though he addresses some highly divisive things, I don’t think this book made him any enemies. He approaches each view in a balanced way, acknowledging the strengths and weaknesses or vulnerabilities of each.
I will also say here that the book is full of Bible references to support all that he says; I didn’t include all of them throughout my review but want readers to know that this is a book written from reading out of the Bible not into the Bible.
The book I read was a re-print of the 2005 revision. The original was written in 1984 as a response to the charismatic ‘tidal wave’ that came across in Britain in the 1960s. There became divisions about what the ‘main role’ of the Spirit was as different groups focused on different aspects of the Spirit’s work and how to understand things like the gifts of the Spirit and speaking in tongues.
Packer said that he wrote this book to do four things:
1) restate the Christ-centered news of the Holy Spirit’s new covenant ministry, to counter the spiritual Spirit-centered news that was spreading
2) reaffirm the biblical call to holiness, in the face of the distortions and neglect from which it had long suffered
3) assess the charismatic movement and its claims even-handedly
4) show that in any case the charismatic vision falls short of the fullness of revival according to the Scriptures, so that however grateful for this movement we may be we must look beyond it.
Part One
“What is the essence, heart, and core of the Spirit’s work today?”
Packer describes several camps of thought, however subtle, that emphasize different aspects of the Spirit’s work. He first shows how these are all founded on a biblical basis of truth and all have importance in terms of how we look at the Spirit, but when we overfocus or take them beyond where they were meant to go it can turn into bad theology.
Power: “giving the ability to do what you know you ought to do and indeed want to do, but feel that you lack the strength for” [Keswick teaching falls here]
the critique: “To start with, it blurs the distinction between manipulating divine power at one’s own will (which is magic) and experiencing it as one obeys God’s will (which is religion).”
Performance: “exercising spiritual gifts… preaching, teaching, prophecy, tongues, healing”
the critique: “any mindset which treats the Spirit’s gifts (ability and willingness to run around and do things) as more important than his fruit (Christlike character in personal life) is spiritually wrongheaded and needs correcting.”
Purification: “cleansing his children from sin’s defilement and pollution by enabling them to resist temptation and do what is right.”
the critique: “Their tendency is to grow legalistic, making tight rules for themselves and others about abstaining from things indifferent, imposing rigid and restrictive behavior patterns as bulwarks against worldliness and attaching great importance to observing these man-made taboos.”
Presentation: “making us aware of things” [Bishop J.V. Taylor]
the critique: “it takes more to constitute real, valid saving knowledge of Jesus than simply being able to mouth his name… knowledge of Christ must be measured, among other texts, by how much of the New Testament teaching about Christ is or is not embraced.”
So while none of these are entirely wrong, imbalances in our thinking creates what he calls a “smudgy” understanding about the Spirit and can thus stifle His ability to work in our lives.
Packer offers a way of looking at the Spirit’s work in a more unified way. He calls it: Presence.
“The distinctive, constant, basic ministry of the Holy Spirit under the new covenant is so to mediate Christ’s presence to believers— that is, to give them such knowledge of his presence with them as their Savior, Lord, and God.”
Then it would follow that we would grow in fellowship with Jesus, be transformed to look more like Christ, and have assurance that we are loved, redeemed, and adopted into his family, encompassing all the other focuses listed above.
Another way to look at it is this:
“It is as if the Spirit stands behind us, throwing light over our shoulder, on Jesus, who stands facing us… The Spirit, we might say, is the matchmaker, the celestial marriage broker, whose role it is to bring us and Christ together and ensure that we stay together.”
Part Two
There are four chapters called ‘Mapping the Spirit’s Path’ that talk about holiness and the charismatic life.
“The pursuit of holiness is… a vital element in Christian mission strategy today. The world’s greatest need is the personal holiness of Christian people.”
He defines holiness as:
“Holiness is in essence obeying God, living to God and for God, imitating God, keeping his law, taking his side against sin, doing righteousness, performing good works, following Christ’s teaching and example, worshiping God in the Spirit, loving and serving God and men out of reverence for Christ.”
He critiques evangelicals for making holiness secondary. Saying we’ve become too busy in activism with little regard for our ‘inner lives’ just like the Pharisees.
He then goes through the principles of holiness (i.e. the nature, the context, the root, the agent, experience, rule, and heart of holiness)
One of the things he talks about that stuck out to me in this part was in regards to repentance: “Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged.”
I also liked how he said that one of the ways by which the Spirit works in our lives is through helping us form holy habits. This is the counter to the ‘let go and let God’ approach and recognizes that the Spirit works through naturally formed habits and it doesn’t always (or usually) have to be a supernatural ‘spiritual experience’ to see the Spirit working.
He spends a chapter here discussing three views of holiness concerning the question- How do we achieve holiness?
I’ll try to make this part brief; it’s obviously more detailed in the book.
The Augustinian view, held by Lutheran and Reformed teachers (Calvin, Owen, Ryle), is based on the principle “that God out of grace (meaning, free, unmerited love to us sinners) and by grace (meaning the Spirit active in our personal lives) must and does work in us all that we ever achieve of the faith, hope, love, worship, and obedience that he requires… God gives what he commands.”
This view emphasizes humility in that we know we are sinful and cannot do anything good on our own, activity in that we must be zealous for good works doing all we can, and change in that we should expect to see transformation even as we acknowledge the daily struggle and failures.
It could be summarized by Phil. 2:12-13 which says- “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
The Wesleyan Perfectionism view holds that there is a second work of grace, post-conversion, in which “all sinful motivation is rooted out of a Christian’s heart.” and comes from teachings of John Wesley— also held by John Fletcher, William Booth, and Oswald Chambers— that actually may have been misinterpreted because of Wesley’s use of the word ‘perfection’. Packer thinks the term ‘total love’ would make more sense for this belief.
This view focuses on love of God and love for others as evidence of this second act of grace where we no longer desire to sin because we are so overcome by the love of God towards us; any sin you commit going forward would be involuntary because you would no longer voluntarily sin because of how much you love God. However, there is no biblical grounds to be confident that God would bestow that kind of transformation this side of heaven, indeed, our own reality and experiences shows us that sin is always creeping at the door. This view also creates uncertainty for Christians who can never seem to be ‘perfect.’
The Keswick teaching is similar to Wesleyan Perfectionism in that they both uphold a belief about attaining sinlessness on Earth. However, Keswick teaching denies human ability to do it. In this view it’s about ‘letting go and letting God’, trusting and having faith that God will keep you from sin. You still remove voluntary sin from your life but through a passive yielding to the Spirit to attain it.
One of the critiques of this view is their use of Paul’s words on ‘surrender.’ [Rom 6:13; 12:1] Packer says surrender here “is not meaning we lapse into inaction but rather that we should report for duty and set no limits to what Christ by his spirit through his Word may direct us to do.” We are not called to be passive, waiting for the Holy Spirit to pop up and change us, but that we are to “resolutely labor by prayer and effort to obey the law of Christ and mortify sin.”
Packer acknowledges that the draw for the Wesleyan and Keswick views is that these views attempt to encourage real hearts that struggle with the ongoing battle of sin and our desire to be free from it and victorious over it. Yet, the reality is that sin still dwells in our hearts and the sanctification process requires an ongoing battle, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to continue to resist temptation and to obey Christ’s teachings, until our promised glorification after this life.
Some might argue that they’ve seen or experienced lives changed by the Wesleyan or Keswick teaching and so doesn’t that mean something? Packer replies that 1) many might not actually get the complete teaching of that particular view but just an understanding of faith in Jesus and his power working in our lives and that 2) “God is very gracious and truly gives himself to all who truly seek him, never mind whether their theology is good or not so good.”
So then does any of this “justify the inaccuracies” of the teachings?
He says: “No. It is not much of a recommendation when all you can say is that this teaching may help you if you do not take its details too seriously… [and] if you do take its details seriously, it will tend not to help you but to destroy you.”
The details of our theology matter. He likens it to car parts being recalled for being faulty. Sure you may be able to drive, but would you want to be driving around in a car with a defective part? Pastorally, defective theology needs to be recalled and corrected.
Charismatic practices/beliefs can often be divisive in churches. What spiritual gifts should we expect to see today? Can/should people speak in tongues? What should worship look like? What should conversion feel like? What should we think about charismatic prophesying?
These are the questions Packer delves into and I can’t go into it all here— especially the speaking in tongues and prophesying parts as I believe his arguments are probably best read within the context of his entire book in detail.
While Packer does have some critiques of the charismatic movement, he spends time listing twelve positive aspects of it including Christ-centeredness, joyfulness, prayerfulness, communal living, and generous giving.
“No type of Christian spirituality is free from dangers, weaknesses, and threats to maturity arising from its very strengths, and it is not as if Christian maturity were overwhelmingly visible in non charismatic circles today.”
He challenges non-charismatic churches to learn from charismatics by being more exuberant and joyful in their worship, not to be passive and relying on their pastors to ‘do everything’ but to be active and fervent in prayer, using our gifts to serve, and being more open to the power of the Spirit at work in their lives. To seek to encourage congregation members to find a role to play in the church instead of being a consumer.
He admonishes any church that feels vindicated that they don’t have the ‘Corinthian’ problem and I agree that a lot of churches should be less orderly if it means the Spirit has risen them up!
“If our reaction as readers is merely to preen ourselves and feel glad because our churches are free from Corinthian disorders, we are fools indeed. The Corinthian disorders were due to an uncontrolled overflow of Holy Spirit life. Many churches today are orderly simply because they are asleep, and with some one fears that it is the sleep of death. It is no great thing to have order in a cemetery!”
He challenges charismatic churches to be more committed to seeking solid theology and a biblical basis for all that they do, to focus less on performance which often creates group pressure to conform in physical and emotional experience, and to be less focused on man-centered or supernatural experiences and more open to God working in the natural.
As for the gifts of tongues, prophesying, and healing, Packer provides biblical arguments for how what is practiced today cannot be convincingly viewed as a ‘restoration’ of what was practiced in Scripture by the apostles. However, he doesn’t necessarily condemn their practice.
For example, of glossolalia (tongues), he says:
“It is often urged that since God’s goal is full integration of the individual under fully self-conscious, rational control, the overall pattern of ongoing sanctification must involve steady recovery of such control as we move deeper into what Scripture calls sincerity simplicity, and single mindedness (Phil 3:13, 2 Cor 11:3, James 1:7-8) In that case, there can be no place for glossolalia, in which rational control of the vocal chords is given up BUT … it does not seem inconceivable that the Spirit might prompt this relaxation of rational control at surface level in order to strengthen control at a deeper level… In this way glossolalia could be a good gift of God for some people at least, on the basis that anything that helps you to concentrate on God, practice his presence, and open yourself to his influence is a good gift.”
You can find his nine conclusions for these things on pg 269-276 (end of Chapter 6).
Generally speaking, Packer applies both a credal and a moral test for the charismatic movement and finds the best practicers of this movement to be aligned with a right theology of the Incarnate Son (credal) and to have a desire to obey God’s commands, avoid sin, and love others (moral).
He reminds us that you don’t have to have perfect theology to experience God in a real way. That is true. Yet, we should be applying these two tests to anything we encounter because not all charismatic churches or experiences fall under ‘best practices.’ We should always be checking beliefs and practices against Scripture in any church we attend and make sure to give God’s Word supremacy over experience because He is our authority in his revealed Word.
“In evaluating charismatic phenomena, it needs to be remembered that group beliefs shape group expectations, and group expectations shape individual experiences. A group with its own teachers and literature can mold the thoughts and experiences of its members to a startling degree. Specifically, when it is believed that an enhanced sense of God and his love to you in Christ and his enabling power, accompanied by tongues, on the model of the apostles’ experience in Acts 2, is the norm, this experiences will certainly be both sought and found. Nor will it necessarily be a delusive, Spiritless, self-generated experience just because certain incorrect notions are attached to it; God, as we keep seeing, is very merciful and blesses those who seek him even when their notions are not all true. But such an experience will then have to be tested as an expectation-shaped experience, and the expectations that shaped it will have to be tested separately, to see if they can be justified in terms of God’s revealed truth.”
Recommendation
I know there was a lot in this review, but I hope it inspires you to give the book a chance. Read it in a group if it will help to put several minds together to grasp what’s going on (I made my dad book club this book with me and it helped a lot!).
It’s true that the inner life is neglected and we’ve been running around with an improper theology of holiness and sinlessness. These things are worth thinking about. We don’t want a smudgy view of Christ or his Spirit, do we?
Packer admonishes that we can’t just say, “Let’s be different!” because “that’s a principle of reaction, and reaction rarely works righteousness.” That’s where the pendulum starts swinging. We need to be thoughtful about what we’re doing and where we’re going, aligning with God’s Word and command.
Let Packer bring some clarity for you. Let him also challenge your church- charismatic or not- to consider how your practices do or do not honor the Spirit. Whether you need to seek more solid theology or to worship with more emotion and heart, be open to the Holy Spirit at work in your life.
The Other Sister by Jessica R. Patch
dark
hopeful
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
“I assumed I was walking into a happily-ever-after, but now… now I can’t help but think I might have walked into a horror film.”
Gasp. That was intense! What a brilliantly crafted thriller!
I loved this book. Although it had dark themes, I thought Patch did a great job shaping it into a redemption story and bringing the light into the darkness. And the twists were spot on! I did suspect some of them, but there were also ones I didn’t see coming! Even the ones I figured out, I’m not mad about it. I would have been mad if she didn’t go that direction.
The title is perfect, the premise compelling, and the execution thrilling.
The basic premise is this:
Charlotte has been in and out of foster homes due to her mother’s drug addiction. When her mother dies of overdose, Charlotte receives a box of her mother’s things, including the surprising knowledge that Charlotte has an identical twin.
Charlotte finds and contacts her twin, Acelynn, to meet up with her in Chicago, but when they’re together, Charlotte’s foster brother and close friend gets himself in trouble with a mobster. Things go bad fast and Charlotte witnesses the murder of not only her friend, Tommy, but also Acelynn. Her only escape route now is to lay low at Acelynn’s house, using her funds to help her find a more permanent way to disappear.
But of course, she is spotted and forced to fess up to her true identity or play the part of Acelynn until she can figure a way out. Charlotte’s own sketchy past has given her the skills to pull it off.
“We all keep certain things about ourselves locked deep down. No one knows every single thing about us or our thoughts. I even try to hide truths from my own self.”
But instead of a dream life, it’s a nightmare. There’s a serial killer on the loose nearby and apparently Acelynn was in a bit of a mess before she went to Chicago.
“I’m not sure I’ve met a single person in Acelynn’s life who isn’t pretending to be someone they aren’t. And that includes me.”
Charlotte’s abilities and street smarts are put to the test as she maneuvers a life and circle she doesn’t know, a suspicious circle Acelynn was at the middle of… with a target on her back.
“I’ve survived a lot. But can I survive this many secrets and knives plunging into my back?”
Though there is no swearing in this book, the darkness is real. There are no graphic descriptions or grisly scenes, but one of the themes in this book is about the evil in our hearts— what are we really capable of?
“Maybe we’re all coexisting, both sides fighting against each other. Sometimes the beauty wins, and sometimes it loses to the beast.”
“I’m believing more than ever that maybe it’s not our upbringing or financial status or even education that shapes us, but our hearts. And our hearts seem to all be dark and wicked to the core.”
Patch uses this identical twin trope to explore the similarities and differences (nature or nurture) between Charlotte and Acelynn— born from the same drug addict mother, but one was a product of the system and the other was adopted, now living a life of luxury and influence.
As Charlotte finds out more and more about Acelynn’s life and the people who fear her, she finds herself introspective, knowing the things she, herself, is capable of, and wondering what’s in their DNA and can she escape the evil intent she finds in her own heart?
Throughout the book we also get chapters titled ‘Then’ where a woman is sharing about her disturbing daughter:
“Other parents would judge me if they knew how terrified of my daughter I am. But they don’t know the evil I live with. The fear that always haunts me, forcing me to keep my mouth shut. They don’t have a child like mine. Vindictive. Evil. A monster. A child they fear.”
These are the darkest parts of the book as we learn the extent to which this daughter is a sociopath, doing evil things and blaming others for it and gaining power by gaining secrets, while the mother is drugged and always on the precipice of being sent away to a psychiatric facility.
As readers we are trying to identify who this sociopathic girl is and what the fallout will be when she strikes in the present.
That’s the true question of this book: how is this all connected? Or is it?
The web woven in this book was phenomenal and strong. Perhaps after sitting with it longer I might think of a loose end, but my first and second thoughts are that no, Patch covered everything and she did a fantastic job!
I wish I could read it for the first time again!
Was it too dark?
Patch actually addresses this question as she talks about one reviewer’s negative thoughts on the book saying it needed more mention of God. I found the blog post HERE and if this is a question you’re asking, her defense may be helpful for you to read.
I’ve read a lot of secular thrillers and some that are really dark, sometimes making me feel disturbed when I’m done. I did not feel that with this book at all. This book does have light and hope and truth that other dark thrillers don’t.
In most secular thrillers there may be a ‘good ending’ to some extent but there isn’t usually any sort of redemption. You’re just stuck with the twisted story.
The reality is that there is darkness in the world. And there is darkness in our hearts.
“No one’s life is filtered on the inside. We’re all a bunch of messy, broken people pretending. Except for those who are free.”
Patch uses the detective character, Christian Patrick, as the light-bringer, almost a Christ figure. In a genre where distrust is a key element, I found it nice to have a character I could trust. Christian is that character.
“He saved me in spite of my failures and flaws, and has kept the door open for confession and truth.”
I liked the illustration Christian gives Charlotte at some point in the book when he’s investigating her and she’s trying to obtain information from him. She is using Acelynn’s interior design job as a way to infiltrate Christian’s house and access his notes on the case. They are discussing new paint colors for his house.
Charlotte- “You know you can paint over wallpaper. Saves time.”
Christian- “I could. But when you paint over another layer like that, it eventually peels, and what’s underneath is revealed. I find stripping away the old, even if it appears pretty, is the right way to go about it. It’s so much easier to work with a completely bare source. It’s fresh and clean and ready for color. I don’t mind the time it takes. I’ll be happier with the results.”
Such a good illustration and a natural way to introduce truth into the story without making it preachy. The only way to break free from the chains of darkness in our hearts is to become a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come. We can’t just ‘cover it up’ and make it look nice on the outside. We need a complete overhaul.
Patch doesn’t share the gospel message word for word, so I would bet that some people reading this book may not fully get where she’s going with some of the subtle hints (it’s hard for me to know what they’ll think) but I think the light is hard to miss.
Along these same lines, we have Charlotte’s discontent with her own life and her desire for what others have. I thought this was a really profound line Patch wrote in regards to that:
“Want is an open grave that needs to be constantly filled.”
So yes, we have wickedness in this story, but we also have light and truth and I can attest that this reads different than your typical secular twisted psychological thriller even if God isn’t mentioned on every page.
Patch says in that blog that instead of telling: “I’d rather SHOW the brokenness. I’d rather use other characters to reveal parts of her heart–corruption, lies, justification of sin, wickedness and even depravity.”
I think Patch’s message is clear: Each of us has brokenness in our hearts, a depraved nature regardless of our upbringing, because we are all sinners. Sin is a path of destruction, an open grave that wants more and more. But we are not without hope. Even when we feel we have done too much and that we are outside the reach of grace, we find an outstretched hand beckoning us to come clean, to free ourselves from the chains of our sin.
And I would agree with Patch when she says, “[My God] is an all consuming fire whether he’s spoken of once or 8 times or 800.”
If you feel convicted to not read this book, by all means, stick to your convictions, but I think Patch’s writing has a great quality to it that invites readers who would not normally pick up a ‘Christian’ book to take in a story that is not afraid to enter into the real mess that we know is in the world, and offer light and hope in a way they may be more willing to hear.
It offers opportunities for us as readers to consider and wrestle with the darkness in our own hearts and the things like discontent, lies, and justification for our sin that we may need to come to terms with.
Recommendation
If you enjoy a good thriller, I would definitely recommend this book! Even if you’re generally put-off by Christian fiction, I would give this book a chance.
If you really try to avoid books that have some dark themes, then it may not be the book for you, but even with the darkness I will reiterate that there is no swearing or graphic scenes and there is plenty of light that contrasts with the darkness.
Jessica Patch is up there for some of my favorite authors and I look forward to reading more of her work!
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
[Content Advisory: no swearing; dark themes of a sociopathic child, a serial killer, abuse, infidelity; nothing graphic is described in detail, no sex scenes but sexual things are referenced]
Gasp. That was intense! What a brilliantly crafted thriller!
I loved this book. Although it had dark themes, I thought Patch did a great job shaping it into a redemption story and bringing the light into the darkness. And the twists were spot on! I did suspect some of them, but there were also ones I didn’t see coming! Even the ones I figured out, I’m not mad about it. I would have been mad if she didn’t go that direction.
The title is perfect, the premise compelling, and the execution thrilling.
The basic premise is this:
Charlotte has been in and out of foster homes due to her mother’s drug addiction. When her mother dies of overdose, Charlotte receives a box of her mother’s things, including the surprising knowledge that Charlotte has an identical twin.
Charlotte finds and contacts her twin, Acelynn, to meet up with her in Chicago, but when they’re together, Charlotte’s foster brother and close friend gets himself in trouble with a mobster. Things go bad fast and Charlotte witnesses the murder of not only her friend, Tommy, but also Acelynn. Her only escape route now is to lay low at Acelynn’s house, using her funds to help her find a more permanent way to disappear.
But of course, she is spotted and forced to fess up to her true identity or play the part of Acelynn until she can figure a way out. Charlotte’s own sketchy past has given her the skills to pull it off.
“We all keep certain things about ourselves locked deep down. No one knows every single thing about us or our thoughts. I even try to hide truths from my own self.”
But instead of a dream life, it’s a nightmare. There’s a serial killer on the loose nearby and apparently Acelynn was in a bit of a mess before she went to Chicago.
“I’m not sure I’ve met a single person in Acelynn’s life who isn’t pretending to be someone they aren’t. And that includes me.”
Charlotte’s abilities and street smarts are put to the test as she maneuvers a life and circle she doesn’t know, a suspicious circle Acelynn was at the middle of… with a target on her back.
“I’ve survived a lot. But can I survive this many secrets and knives plunging into my back?”
Though there is no swearing in this book, the darkness is real. There are no graphic descriptions or grisly scenes, but one of the themes in this book is about the evil in our hearts— what are we really capable of?
“Maybe we’re all coexisting, both sides fighting against each other. Sometimes the beauty wins, and sometimes it loses to the beast.”
“I’m believing more than ever that maybe it’s not our upbringing or financial status or even education that shapes us, but our hearts. And our hearts seem to all be dark and wicked to the core.”
Patch uses this identical twin trope to explore the similarities and differences (nature or nurture) between Charlotte and Acelynn— born from the same drug addict mother, but one was a product of the system and the other was adopted, now living a life of luxury and influence.
As Charlotte finds out more and more about Acelynn’s life and the people who fear her, she finds herself introspective, knowing the things she, herself, is capable of, and wondering what’s in their DNA and can she escape the evil intent she finds in her own heart?
Throughout the book we also get chapters titled ‘Then’ where a woman is sharing about her disturbing daughter:
“Other parents would judge me if they knew how terrified of my daughter I am. But they don’t know the evil I live with. The fear that always haunts me, forcing me to keep my mouth shut. They don’t have a child like mine. Vindictive. Evil. A monster. A child they fear.”
These are the darkest parts of the book as we learn the extent to which this daughter is a sociopath, doing evil things and blaming others for it and gaining power by gaining secrets, while the mother is drugged and always on the precipice of being sent away to a psychiatric facility.
As readers we are trying to identify who this sociopathic girl is and what the fallout will be when she strikes in the present.
That’s the true question of this book: how is this all connected? Or is it?
The web woven in this book was phenomenal and strong. Perhaps after sitting with it longer I might think of a loose end, but my first and second thoughts are that no, Patch covered everything and she did a fantastic job!
I wish I could read it for the first time again!
Was it too dark?
Patch actually addresses this question as she talks about one reviewer’s negative thoughts on the book saying it needed more mention of God. I found the blog post HERE and if this is a question you’re asking, her defense may be helpful for you to read.
I’ve read a lot of secular thrillers and some that are really dark, sometimes making me feel disturbed when I’m done. I did not feel that with this book at all. This book does have light and hope and truth that other dark thrillers don’t.
In most secular thrillers there may be a ‘good ending’ to some extent but there isn’t usually any sort of redemption. You’re just stuck with the twisted story.
The reality is that there is darkness in the world. And there is darkness in our hearts.
“No one’s life is filtered on the inside. We’re all a bunch of messy, broken people pretending. Except for those who are free.”
Patch uses the detective character, Christian Patrick, as the light-bringer, almost a Christ figure. In a genre where distrust is a key element, I found it nice to have a character I could trust. Christian is that character.
“He saved me in spite of my failures and flaws, and has kept the door open for confession and truth.”
I liked the illustration Christian gives Charlotte at some point in the book when he’s investigating her and she’s trying to obtain information from him. She is using Acelynn’s interior design job as a way to infiltrate Christian’s house and access his notes on the case. They are discussing new paint colors for his house.
Charlotte- “You know you can paint over wallpaper. Saves time.”
Christian- “I could. But when you paint over another layer like that, it eventually peels, and what’s underneath is revealed. I find stripping away the old, even if it appears pretty, is the right way to go about it. It’s so much easier to work with a completely bare source. It’s fresh and clean and ready for color. I don’t mind the time it takes. I’ll be happier with the results.”
Such a good illustration and a natural way to introduce truth into the story without making it preachy. The only way to break free from the chains of darkness in our hearts is to become a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come. We can’t just ‘cover it up’ and make it look nice on the outside. We need a complete overhaul.
Patch doesn’t share the gospel message word for word, so I would bet that some people reading this book may not fully get where she’s going with some of the subtle hints (it’s hard for me to know what they’ll think) but I think the light is hard to miss.
Along these same lines, we have Charlotte’s discontent with her own life and her desire for what others have. I thought this was a really profound line Patch wrote in regards to that:
“Want is an open grave that needs to be constantly filled.”
So yes, we have wickedness in this story, but we also have light and truth and I can attest that this reads different than your typical secular twisted psychological thriller even if God isn’t mentioned on every page.
Patch says in that blog that instead of telling: “I’d rather SHOW the brokenness. I’d rather use other characters to reveal parts of her heart–corruption, lies, justification of sin, wickedness and even depravity.”
I think Patch’s message is clear: Each of us has brokenness in our hearts, a depraved nature regardless of our upbringing, because we are all sinners. Sin is a path of destruction, an open grave that wants more and more. But we are not without hope. Even when we feel we have done too much and that we are outside the reach of grace, we find an outstretched hand beckoning us to come clean, to free ourselves from the chains of our sin.
And I would agree with Patch when she says, “[My God] is an all consuming fire whether he’s spoken of once or 8 times or 800.”
If you feel convicted to not read this book, by all means, stick to your convictions, but I think Patch’s writing has a great quality to it that invites readers who would not normally pick up a ‘Christian’ book to take in a story that is not afraid to enter into the real mess that we know is in the world, and offer light and hope in a way they may be more willing to hear.
It offers opportunities for us as readers to consider and wrestle with the darkness in our own hearts and the things like discontent, lies, and justification for our sin that we may need to come to terms with.
Recommendation
If you enjoy a good thriller, I would definitely recommend this book! Even if you’re generally put-off by Christian fiction, I would give this book a chance.
If you really try to avoid books that have some dark themes, then it may not be the book for you, but even with the darkness I will reiterate that there is no swearing or graphic scenes and there is plenty of light that contrasts with the darkness.
Jessica Patch is up there for some of my favorite authors and I look forward to reading more of her work!
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
[Content Advisory: no swearing; dark themes of a sociopathic child, a serial killer, abuse, infidelity; nothing graphic is described in detail, no sex scenes but sexual things are referenced]
Nobody's Fool by Harlan Coben
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
“Did it all go wrong the moment I saw you?”
I thought this was a standalone book but it turns out it’s a sequel to Fool Me Once, which I read way back in 2016 and virtually remember none of. Even if you go back to read that book’s summary it doesn’t really give you much information about Sami Kierce and it doesn’t seem like he’s much of a main character.
If you plan to read Nobody’s Fool, I would recommend at least looking at spoilers for Fool Me Once because a couple members from the case show up in this book but with no context other than you know Sami Kierce does not like them at all. So if you want to know what that’s all about, you’ll have to do a little research.
This was a really good, fast-paced thriller. I read it in two days, somehow. But I’m not surprised because I’ve always liked Harlan Coben’s books. And I haven’t read one in awhile so it was fun to get back to one of his.
I will say, though, that I had to keep telling myself I wasn’t reading a Myron Bolitar novel. For some reason Sami Kierce felt like the same person. But Kierce is Pakistani and I kept picturing someone else. I wish there would have been more to describe him so I could better picture who he was as a character. Especially with this book being written so long after the first one it seems like Coben should have ‘refreshed’ the readers on who Kierce was.
Other than that, I can’t think of any other critiques of this book.
In Nobody’s Fool, Kierce is a bit of a disgraced police officer, thrown off the force for a mistake on a different case. He spends some of his time teaching a somewhat ‘off the books’ criminology class to an ecclectic bunch.
It’s in one of these classes that his past comes back to haunt him. A woman shows up that looks an awful lot like a girl he had a fling with in Spain on a backpacking trip many years ago. A girl he thought he had killed. Well… killed as in: he woke up from a drug and alcohol infused night to see her dead beside him and his hands covered in blood.
This shocking cameo (and then quick departure) sends Kierce on a new mission— to find her and find out what happened to her all those years ago.
We also have a side quest which may or may not be connected that also dredges up Kierce’s past. His first wife and fellow cop was murdered by an ex-boyfriend (also many years ago). But Kierce’s recent fall from grace has spurred reinvestigations and overturned verdicts based on any evidence gathered or touched by Kierce… including the prison release of the man convicted of killing his wife.
Kierce brings real life to the classroom as he uses the help of his students to look into both of these ‘problems’.
One of the things I really like about the book, other than the suspense and action, were the characters. Even if Kierce was too similar to Bolitar professionally and humorously, he had something Bolitar didn’t: a wife and son. I loved the relationship between Kierce and his wife and that he never tried to hide anything from her or lie to her… well I guess other than what happened in Spain… but he came clean about that. Filling Molly in on his investigations reiterated that they were a team and very close to one another and I liked that.
His students are also great characters. They all kinda have their own thing and come from different walks of life, but they all have a passion for solving mysteries so they’re willing to work together and they become bonded by the class and Kierce.
While I’m not entirely sure if I LOVED the ending (because I’m a hardcore justice fan), I think I can understand it. Maybe not on a personal level, but based on the compounded circumstances, I guess the outcome makes sense.
This book does end on a bit of a question mark or an open door to another book. And I would definitely read it.
Recommendation
I’m a fan of Harlan Coben and recommend his books, including this one. They have good characters, lots of action and suspense, and even some twists and turns. I never really had this one figured out and I’m totally okay with it!
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
[Content Advisory: 4 f-words, 19 s-words; not really any sexual content; mentions of child-trafficking with one of the characters]
I thought this was a standalone book but it turns out it’s a sequel to Fool Me Once, which I read way back in 2016 and virtually remember none of. Even if you go back to read that book’s summary it doesn’t really give you much information about Sami Kierce and it doesn’t seem like he’s much of a main character.
If you plan to read Nobody’s Fool, I would recommend at least looking at spoilers for Fool Me Once because a couple members from the case show up in this book but with no context other than you know Sami Kierce does not like them at all. So if you want to know what that’s all about, you’ll have to do a little research.
This was a really good, fast-paced thriller. I read it in two days, somehow. But I’m not surprised because I’ve always liked Harlan Coben’s books. And I haven’t read one in awhile so it was fun to get back to one of his.
I will say, though, that I had to keep telling myself I wasn’t reading a Myron Bolitar novel. For some reason Sami Kierce felt like the same person. But Kierce is Pakistani and I kept picturing someone else. I wish there would have been more to describe him so I could better picture who he was as a character. Especially with this book being written so long after the first one it seems like Coben should have ‘refreshed’ the readers on who Kierce was.
Other than that, I can’t think of any other critiques of this book.
In Nobody’s Fool, Kierce is a bit of a disgraced police officer, thrown off the force for a mistake on a different case. He spends some of his time teaching a somewhat ‘off the books’ criminology class to an ecclectic bunch.
It’s in one of these classes that his past comes back to haunt him. A woman shows up that looks an awful lot like a girl he had a fling with in Spain on a backpacking trip many years ago. A girl he thought he had killed. Well… killed as in: he woke up from a drug and alcohol infused night to see her dead beside him and his hands covered in blood.
This shocking cameo (and then quick departure) sends Kierce on a new mission— to find her and find out what happened to her all those years ago.
We also have a side quest which may or may not be connected that also dredges up Kierce’s past. His first wife and fellow cop was murdered by an ex-boyfriend (also many years ago). But Kierce’s recent fall from grace has spurred reinvestigations and overturned verdicts based on any evidence gathered or touched by Kierce… including the prison release of the man convicted of killing his wife.
Kierce brings real life to the classroom as he uses the help of his students to look into both of these ‘problems’.
One of the things I really like about the book, other than the suspense and action, were the characters. Even if Kierce was too similar to Bolitar professionally and humorously, he had something Bolitar didn’t: a wife and son. I loved the relationship between Kierce and his wife and that he never tried to hide anything from her or lie to her… well I guess other than what happened in Spain… but he came clean about that. Filling Molly in on his investigations reiterated that they were a team and very close to one another and I liked that.
His students are also great characters. They all kinda have their own thing and come from different walks of life, but they all have a passion for solving mysteries so they’re willing to work together and they become bonded by the class and Kierce.
While I’m not entirely sure if I LOVED the ending (because I’m a hardcore justice fan), I think I can understand it. Maybe not on a personal level, but based on the compounded circumstances, I guess the outcome makes sense.
This book does end on a bit of a question mark or an open door to another book. And I would definitely read it.
Recommendation
I’m a fan of Harlan Coben and recommend his books, including this one. They have good characters, lots of action and suspense, and even some twists and turns. I never really had this one figured out and I’m totally okay with it!
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
[Content Advisory: 4 f-words, 19 s-words; not really any sexual content; mentions of child-trafficking with one of the characters]
Some Like it Scot by Pepper Basham
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
“Home. We’re all trying to find it. Sometimes it’s a place. Sometimes it’s a person. Sometimes it’s both.”
“The very real fear lay between wanting to believe in the beauty but seeing only the brokenness. Maybe that beauty was worth being brave for.”
When I realized that Check & Mate wasn’t going to be for me, I pivoted to a different rom-com— Some Like It Scot. I had not read anything by Pepper Basham but I knew this would be a clean rom-com which is more my speed.
If you prefer your romance to be spicy and graphic, you won’t find that in this book, but there were definitely sparks. And I’m not the ‘swooning’ type but I imagine many moments in this book would qualify.
The Scottish setting is a romantic one. Plus there’s just something about an accent right?
The premise is this:
Katie Campbell is in Scotland on assignment for her traveling social media page— Miss Adventure— to participate in what is called the ‘Edwardian Experience’. Two weeks in an old period mansion immersed in the Edwardian era dress, food, culture, and traditions. To really see what it was like during that time (early 1900s).
Along with several other influencers/ influential people, Katie’s job is to showcase the experience for her followers as advertisement.
Traveling has been her drug, her coping mechanism after losing a sister at a young age and dealing with an unstable family life.
“measuring up to a perfect sister was hard enough when she lived. Measuring up to a memory was impossible.”
Her grandparents (first generation Scottish Americans) were her home but have recently passed.
Being in Scotland has awakened in Katie many emotions and the potential ‘home’ that has seemed all too elusive.
Of course, the attention of a ‘hot Scot’ may have stoked that fire a little bit as well.
There were many things to like in this book, but I also have a few critiques.
I liked the setting. I haven’t been to Scotland (yet) but Basham did a good job of describing the atmosphere and cultural vibe. I did end up on a rabbit trail looking up Scottish slang words, but it was actually helpful because I was better able to read in my head the Scottish accent. It had a very cozy vibe that made me, even though I hate dreary, want to get caught in the rain and warm up by the fireplace.
I liked the found-family aspect and that as much as Katie liked Graeme (he’s the ‘hot Scot’), she was just as enamored with his mom and nephew. Stories often punctuate love within families that are at odds with one another or with the love interest, so I enjoy when the love interest fits into the family so well.
I thought it was an interesting premise to have the reason for Katie being there to have to do with a different historical period. It offered unique ways for the characters to interact as well as move the plot along. I will say, I’m not entirely sure if I grasped what the Edwardian era really was (though I looked it up and it’s the period AFTER the Victorian era because King Edward was Queen Victoria’s son and that’s why I kept picturing Victorian stuff; there was probably some overlap) and I did feel like the usage of the word ‘Edwardian’ and ‘Edwardian Experience’ felt a little overbearing (almost 100 times).
I liked the sweetness of the story. Basham showed that you don’t have to have two people ripping each other’s shirts off to have sexual tension and attraction and love. You get to see more depth in the characters and their emotional relationship. It was just a lovely story.
I liked that Katie and Graeme had both experienced the loss of a sibling and that Katie was able to see his family’s way of grieving in contrast to her own parents’ way of grieving and to recognize what is healthy and okay.
I really liked that when Allison showed up at Graeme’s house, when Katie was supposed to come over, it wasn’t the scene you would usually expect to have where Katie misreads the situation, thinking Graeme is still in love with Allison and runs away believing it’s all over. Basham writes this scene in a much better way and preferable way. “This is not a Hallmark miscommunication scene.”
I liked the notion of ‘lingering’, ‘tarrying.’
I liked that Katie was a tall girl. I’m not super tall but I suspect many tall females out there would love more representation.
For the most part I enjoyed the humor aspect of the book. It has a good title, and if you love puns, this will be a right up your alley. I have mixed feelings about puns, especially in written form as in a book because it feels like you have to do it just right to have the funniest effect. Some of the humor in this book seemed cheesy or trying too hard, but other times it hit right. I’m trying to figure out if we can get the humor of Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood but in a cleaner story. This wasn’t quite there, but it was several steps in the right direction.
I didn’t particularly like that Katie’s main ‘thing’ was her clumsiness and propensity for trouble. It makes for a great social media page name, but beyond that, I just don’t like that kind of trope. It feels too obnoxious and performative to be a real trait. How does someone fall and spill so much?!
I’m also not super engaged with a character that has such a shockingly negative self-perception. I had to reflect on this several times because I was just like- how can she really think so low of herself in all these different situations? And I get that I don’t really understand what it’s like to be told you’re not enough over and over in different ways by your own parents and how that would have to shape your self-perception.
I just think I enjoy female characters with self-confidence more (not arrogance but a realistic view of themselves) and that know their strengths (and their weaknesses). It’s probably just more relatable to me. That’s not to say it was a bad choice for this book, and it’s good for me to think about the internal experience of someone different from me, but it’s just not my favorite kind of character. The constant- how could anyone love me?- seemed a bit too over the top.
I felt like the competition aspect with Mark started out good, but then Mark just kinda screwed himself over and found himself kicked out so the tension there really evaporated fast. I think if you’re going to introduce a rivalry like that that she should have finished it in a more full way. The focus shifted, as it should with this being a love story, but then the rivalry basically vanished instead of settling in a concrete way.
Another thing I didn’t like, but it’s also probably why I don’t typically love romance novels in the first place— so many comments about his shoulders and jawline! I mean I guess there could be worse body parts to name all the time, but still.
I looked at a lot of the negative reviews on Goodreads and the common thread (in almost every one) was that people were turned off that it was a Christian book or that it was too modest.
I guess they felt like the ‘religious’ aspect of the book should have been tagged more clearly in the book summary.
It is technically a Christian book. There are elements of Katie and Graeme’s faith interspersed throughout the book, but I wouldn’t say the faith aspect is the main point of the book. I think Basham’s goal was to write a clean rom-com that just didn’t try to hide faith. I didn’t find the faith references to be cheesy or too much.
However, I don’t know what it’s like to read a Christian fiction book when you weren’t wanting to so I can’t perceive how the story will come across to those who don’t typically like or want to read a ‘Christian’ book.
I think it’s tough to write romance these days when smut is so glorified. Modesty is seen as juvenile or laughable. Everyone has their own convictions on how much is too much spice but I will support and appreciate authors who are willing to hold the line on modesty because we need to normalize romance that is not illicit or graphic. Love does not need to be forbidden or steamy to be true and deep. Actually I think they are diametrically opposed.
Recommendation
There is definitely an audience who will probably not like this book, but I would say the reasons are preferential rather than qualitative. Those who want their romance to be smut, will not find that here. Those who do not want to read a book with any Christian references, might not like this book.
But if you are anyone else, I think you would enjoy this book! It’s a good, cozy, sweet rom-com with hints of humor and hints of faith. It draws on elements of finding family, finding yourself, and finding home. Plus who doesn’t love a Scottish setting for a love story?
When I’m in the mood for a rom-com, I’ll definitely keep Basham on my radar!
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
“The very real fear lay between wanting to believe in the beauty but seeing only the brokenness. Maybe that beauty was worth being brave for.”
When I realized that Check & Mate wasn’t going to be for me, I pivoted to a different rom-com— Some Like It Scot. I had not read anything by Pepper Basham but I knew this would be a clean rom-com which is more my speed.
If you prefer your romance to be spicy and graphic, you won’t find that in this book, but there were definitely sparks. And I’m not the ‘swooning’ type but I imagine many moments in this book would qualify.
The Scottish setting is a romantic one. Plus there’s just something about an accent right?
The premise is this:
Katie Campbell is in Scotland on assignment for her traveling social media page— Miss Adventure— to participate in what is called the ‘Edwardian Experience’. Two weeks in an old period mansion immersed in the Edwardian era dress, food, culture, and traditions. To really see what it was like during that time (early 1900s).
Along with several other influencers/ influential people, Katie’s job is to showcase the experience for her followers as advertisement.
Traveling has been her drug, her coping mechanism after losing a sister at a young age and dealing with an unstable family life.
“measuring up to a perfect sister was hard enough when she lived. Measuring up to a memory was impossible.”
Her grandparents (first generation Scottish Americans) were her home but have recently passed.
Being in Scotland has awakened in Katie many emotions and the potential ‘home’ that has seemed all too elusive.
Of course, the attention of a ‘hot Scot’ may have stoked that fire a little bit as well.
There were many things to like in this book, but I also have a few critiques.
I liked the setting. I haven’t been to Scotland (yet) but Basham did a good job of describing the atmosphere and cultural vibe. I did end up on a rabbit trail looking up Scottish slang words, but it was actually helpful because I was better able to read in my head the Scottish accent. It had a very cozy vibe that made me, even though I hate dreary, want to get caught in the rain and warm up by the fireplace.
I liked the found-family aspect and that as much as Katie liked Graeme (he’s the ‘hot Scot’), she was just as enamored with his mom and nephew. Stories often punctuate love within families that are at odds with one another or with the love interest, so I enjoy when the love interest fits into the family so well.
I thought it was an interesting premise to have the reason for Katie being there to have to do with a different historical period. It offered unique ways for the characters to interact as well as move the plot along. I will say, I’m not entirely sure if I grasped what the Edwardian era really was (though I looked it up and it’s the period AFTER the Victorian era because King Edward was Queen Victoria’s son and that’s why I kept picturing Victorian stuff; there was probably some overlap) and I did feel like the usage of the word ‘Edwardian’ and ‘Edwardian Experience’ felt a little overbearing (almost 100 times).
I liked the sweetness of the story. Basham showed that you don’t have to have two people ripping each other’s shirts off to have sexual tension and attraction and love. You get to see more depth in the characters and their emotional relationship. It was just a lovely story.
I liked that Katie and Graeme had both experienced the loss of a sibling and that Katie was able to see his family’s way of grieving in contrast to her own parents’ way of grieving and to recognize what is healthy and okay.
I really liked that when Allison showed up at Graeme’s house, when Katie was supposed to come over, it wasn’t the scene you would usually expect to have where Katie misreads the situation, thinking Graeme is still in love with Allison and runs away believing it’s all over. Basham writes this scene in a much better way and preferable way. “This is not a Hallmark miscommunication scene.”
I liked the notion of ‘lingering’, ‘tarrying.’
I liked that Katie was a tall girl. I’m not super tall but I suspect many tall females out there would love more representation.
For the most part I enjoyed the humor aspect of the book. It has a good title, and if you love puns, this will be a right up your alley. I have mixed feelings about puns, especially in written form as in a book because it feels like you have to do it just right to have the funniest effect. Some of the humor in this book seemed cheesy or trying too hard, but other times it hit right. I’m trying to figure out if we can get the humor of Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood but in a cleaner story. This wasn’t quite there, but it was several steps in the right direction.
I didn’t particularly like that Katie’s main ‘thing’ was her clumsiness and propensity for trouble. It makes for a great social media page name, but beyond that, I just don’t like that kind of trope. It feels too obnoxious and performative to be a real trait. How does someone fall and spill so much?!
I’m also not super engaged with a character that has such a shockingly negative self-perception. I had to reflect on this several times because I was just like- how can she really think so low of herself in all these different situations? And I get that I don’t really understand what it’s like to be told you’re not enough over and over in different ways by your own parents and how that would have to shape your self-perception.
I just think I enjoy female characters with self-confidence more (not arrogance but a realistic view of themselves) and that know their strengths (and their weaknesses). It’s probably just more relatable to me. That’s not to say it was a bad choice for this book, and it’s good for me to think about the internal experience of someone different from me, but it’s just not my favorite kind of character. The constant- how could anyone love me?- seemed a bit too over the top.
I felt like the competition aspect with Mark started out good, but then Mark just kinda screwed himself over and found himself kicked out so the tension there really evaporated fast. I think if you’re going to introduce a rivalry like that that she should have finished it in a more full way. The focus shifted, as it should with this being a love story, but then the rivalry basically vanished instead of settling in a concrete way.
Another thing I didn’t like, but it’s also probably why I don’t typically love romance novels in the first place— so many comments about his shoulders and jawline! I mean I guess there could be worse body parts to name all the time, but still.
I looked at a lot of the negative reviews on Goodreads and the common thread (in almost every one) was that people were turned off that it was a Christian book or that it was too modest.
I guess they felt like the ‘religious’ aspect of the book should have been tagged more clearly in the book summary.
It is technically a Christian book. There are elements of Katie and Graeme’s faith interspersed throughout the book, but I wouldn’t say the faith aspect is the main point of the book. I think Basham’s goal was to write a clean rom-com that just didn’t try to hide faith. I didn’t find the faith references to be cheesy or too much.
However, I don’t know what it’s like to read a Christian fiction book when you weren’t wanting to so I can’t perceive how the story will come across to those who don’t typically like or want to read a ‘Christian’ book.
I think it’s tough to write romance these days when smut is so glorified. Modesty is seen as juvenile or laughable. Everyone has their own convictions on how much is too much spice but I will support and appreciate authors who are willing to hold the line on modesty because we need to normalize romance that is not illicit or graphic. Love does not need to be forbidden or steamy to be true and deep. Actually I think they are diametrically opposed.
Recommendation
There is definitely an audience who will probably not like this book, but I would say the reasons are preferential rather than qualitative. Those who want their romance to be smut, will not find that here. Those who do not want to read a book with any Christian references, might not like this book.
But if you are anyone else, I think you would enjoy this book! It’s a good, cozy, sweet rom-com with hints of humor and hints of faith. It draws on elements of finding family, finding yourself, and finding home. Plus who doesn’t love a Scottish setting for a love story?
When I’m in the mood for a rom-com, I’ll definitely keep Basham on my radar!
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood
Did not finish book. Stopped at 6%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 6%.
Well this was another Did Not Finish for me. After reading only one chapter and looking at other reviews I knew this was not the book for me.
For one, the main character is bisexual which was unexpected considering it is supposed to be a love story between a girl and boy (which I think it still is) but in the first chapter there was already a reference to girls she had previously dated and based on other reviews, it sounds like there are a lot of bisexual-type comments.
For two, half the reviews I read I did not even understand what they were talking about. I had to look up slang terms and abbreviations and they were critiquing generational references within the book that meant nothing, positive or negative, to me. This was a YA book and I often enjoy those, but sounds like this was possibly more niche than others in terms of references and relatability.
For three, the other half of the reviews I read that I DID understand mention that even though there is no spice or smut there is talk about sex a lot, even between the main character’s younger sisters and a man they don’t know as if to normalize it and I am not about that. I would still like to normalize teenagers not having sex at all.
For four, a lot of the people that really liked the book talked about relating to and loving the aspect of the main character’s taking care of and providing for her family at a young age and that’s not really a character trope that I’m super interested in, especially at the teen level. I felt like it worked for Hunger Games, but I’m struggling to think of another book where I enjoyed that trope and can’t think of one at the moment.
I’m already hesitant about reading any book that has romance in it because I prefer to avoid sex stuff so all of these things combined— and the fact that no other review compelled me to continue—made it hard to justify pushing on when I already have so many other books on my TBR list.
So, I have read one Ali Hazelwood book, Love Theoretically, which I review at length HERE. In my review I said I would LOVE if Hazelwood would put out some PG-13 version of her writing because there were aspects about it that were really good, including the humor but I didn’t want all the sexual content or swearing.
I think that’s why I had Check & Mate on my TBR. I thought this was what I was waiting for. Turns out, it wasn’t quite the PG-13 version I was hoping for. Maybe we should try again for PG-13 version with adult characters. I don’t know. It may just be that Hazelwood and I have too many core belief differences that would keep putting me at odds with her writing. I might just have to come to terms with that.
Recommendation
I’m not sure how to recommend this book. It was the Goodreads winner in 2023 for YA Fiction so there’s obviously a lot of people who disagree with me.
Some of the reasons for not finishing may not be problems for teenagers since it’s written for their age group, but other reasons make me think it shouldn’t be read by teenagers either.
If you like to be careful about what kind of romance books you read, then I would say look elsewhere.
If you are a teenager and you already enjoy Hazelwood’s adult books, then I suppose this one would probably be in line with what you like.
If you are an adult and you already enjoy Hazelwood’s adult books, I can’t promise you’ll like the ‘youth’ version because I’m not qualified to evaluate the references and lingo to determine what is cool (is that what I’m even evaluating??) or not…
Basically… I’m probably not much help in the recommendation department.
Out for Blood by Ryan Steck
adventurous
tense
fast-paced
5.0
This was an action-packed thriller!
It has some Bourne Identity type vibes because Matthew is an ex-Marine who is being hunted by a government agency because of information he has but because of his particular set of skills he can be significantly outnumbered and still single-handedly take them all down.
It’s definitely a ‘hero’ story.
I hadn’t realized this was book three when I read it. They give some context to where they’ve been before and what has led Redd to be in the current situation. I was able to enjoy the book and understand everything without having read the first two, but considering how good this one was, I think I would recommend reading from the beginning. I think there was definitely some character development for Matthew and his wife and Matthew’s relationship with his dad that I didn’t fully get with just starting here.
If you like thrillers with lots of tactical maneuvering, danger, and seemingly-impossible-to-survive-lone-man scenarios, this is definitely the book for you!
The setting of this book adds a lot to the story. It takes place largely in Montana near Matthew’s ranch. He’s been living there with his wife and their infant son, trying to get away from it all. But ‘it all’ finds him when a federal prison transport is attacked and the prisoner is killed. A prisoner who had confessed a lot of secrets to Matthew. He knows they need to silence him next.
So using the woods and the ensuing winter storm to his advantage, Matthew lures the enemy team into his territory where he can set up a better defense. He knows the terrain and can handle the weather. Of course he also has the help from his stealthy steed, Remington, and loyal Rottweiler, Rubble. (Don’t worry, they don’t die.)
If you were to have read the previous books I think this ‘enemy’ would have been set up more. It’s a cabal of sorts, called the Twelve. So if you want more backstory on the bad guys, I think they are what is ‘discovered’ prior to this book. The next book looks to introduce a new ‘bad guy’ so I’m thinking the Twelve’s story is wrapped up in Out for Blood.
My main criticism is something pretty minor but maybe if Steck reads this, he will take note. I am a big fan of nicknames, at least in real life. I don’t see them used very effectively in a lot of books I read. I’m still pondering if nicknames in books makes sense or if it feels too contrived. But the way Steck uses names/nicknames in this book was a bit too much.
Matthew is the main character. He sometimes goes by Matt. That’s fine. Only a few people are allowed to call him Matty, but those few characters are also pretty much the only other characters in the book. Also his son’s name is Matthew but they call him Matty. You don’t call a man and the junior the same name. My husband is Michael, his dad is Mike. They don’t both go by Mikey, that would be weird.
So we have Matty and Matty. Then Matthew’s friend is Mikey. Then we have Martin who goes by Marty. And then we have Stephanie who he knew by the name Sammy. Do you see where I’m going with this? We need some different creativity or just less creativity. Not everyone needs a nickname.
Also, one more note on little Matty. If he still has regular hearing in the next book I’m going to be amazed because what he just went through in this book probably should have destroyed his ear drums. But I’m guessing we’re going to need to sidestep this reality (which is totally fine).
Recommendation
I would definitely recommend this book, for sure if you like authors like Jack Carr, Brad Thor, or C.J. Box. I have not read any of these other authors yet, but they’ve all endorsed Ryan Steck and I think his writing must be similar in themes and content— i.e. guns and military and tactics, etc.
I read a wide variety of books so these kind of books are ones I do enjoy, but aren’t necessarily my bread and butter. So even if you don’t typically read special-ops mission books, I think you would still enjoy this one. There is some technical gun stuff, but everything is very easy to follow and it’s a clean book, especially considering the military/violence aspect which I appreciate.
If you like this kind of book, I would also recommend Steven James’ Travis Brock or Patrick Bowers series.
If you hate books with guns and show-downs, you might want to pass on this one.
[Content Advisory: no swearing or sexual content; a lot of violence, a little gore]
**Received an ARC via Tyndale in exchange for an honest review**
It has some Bourne Identity type vibes because Matthew is an ex-Marine who is being hunted by a government agency because of information he has but because of his particular set of skills he can be significantly outnumbered and still single-handedly take them all down.
It’s definitely a ‘hero’ story.
I hadn’t realized this was book three when I read it. They give some context to where they’ve been before and what has led Redd to be in the current situation. I was able to enjoy the book and understand everything without having read the first two, but considering how good this one was, I think I would recommend reading from the beginning. I think there was definitely some character development for Matthew and his wife and Matthew’s relationship with his dad that I didn’t fully get with just starting here.
If you like thrillers with lots of tactical maneuvering, danger, and seemingly-impossible-to-survive-lone-man scenarios, this is definitely the book for you!
The setting of this book adds a lot to the story. It takes place largely in Montana near Matthew’s ranch. He’s been living there with his wife and their infant son, trying to get away from it all. But ‘it all’ finds him when a federal prison transport is attacked and the prisoner is killed. A prisoner who had confessed a lot of secrets to Matthew. He knows they need to silence him next.
So using the woods and the ensuing winter storm to his advantage, Matthew lures the enemy team into his territory where he can set up a better defense. He knows the terrain and can handle the weather. Of course he also has the help from his stealthy steed, Remington, and loyal Rottweiler, Rubble. (Don’t worry, they don’t die.)
If you were to have read the previous books I think this ‘enemy’ would have been set up more. It’s a cabal of sorts, called the Twelve. So if you want more backstory on the bad guys, I think they are what is ‘discovered’ prior to this book. The next book looks to introduce a new ‘bad guy’ so I’m thinking the Twelve’s story is wrapped up in Out for Blood.
My main criticism is something pretty minor but maybe if Steck reads this, he will take note. I am a big fan of nicknames, at least in real life. I don’t see them used very effectively in a lot of books I read. I’m still pondering if nicknames in books makes sense or if it feels too contrived. But the way Steck uses names/nicknames in this book was a bit too much.
Matthew is the main character. He sometimes goes by Matt. That’s fine. Only a few people are allowed to call him Matty, but those few characters are also pretty much the only other characters in the book. Also his son’s name is Matthew but they call him Matty. You don’t call a man and the junior the same name. My husband is Michael, his dad is Mike. They don’t both go by Mikey, that would be weird.
So we have Matty and Matty. Then Matthew’s friend is Mikey. Then we have Martin who goes by Marty. And then we have Stephanie who he knew by the name Sammy. Do you see where I’m going with this? We need some different creativity or just less creativity. Not everyone needs a nickname.
Also, one more note on little Matty. If he still has regular hearing in the next book I’m going to be amazed because what he just went through in this book probably should have destroyed his ear drums. But I’m guessing we’re going to need to sidestep this reality (which is totally fine).
Recommendation
I would definitely recommend this book, for sure if you like authors like Jack Carr, Brad Thor, or C.J. Box. I have not read any of these other authors yet, but they’ve all endorsed Ryan Steck and I think his writing must be similar in themes and content— i.e. guns and military and tactics, etc.
I read a wide variety of books so these kind of books are ones I do enjoy, but aren’t necessarily my bread and butter. So even if you don’t typically read special-ops mission books, I think you would still enjoy this one. There is some technical gun stuff, but everything is very easy to follow and it’s a clean book, especially considering the military/violence aspect which I appreciate.
If you like this kind of book, I would also recommend Steven James’ Travis Brock or Patrick Bowers series.
If you hate books with guns and show-downs, you might want to pass on this one.
[Content Advisory: no swearing or sexual content; a lot of violence, a little gore]
**Received an ARC via Tyndale in exchange for an honest review**
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell
challenging
funny
informative
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
I enjoyed Montell’s book, Cultish, even though there were some problematic areas because I thought there were some really interesting and important things to think about. I think my conclusion for this book is about the same.
I guess I was a little surprised by all the negative reviews for this book. Probably because I wasn’t coming into this book expecting a scholarly work or even a perspective I completely agreed with. I felt like it met my expectations.
I think the idea that people are irrational overthinkers intrigued me because I like to try to understand why people reach different conclusions or decisions than I would, especially when the choices don’t make any sense to me. Of course, I never have cognitive biases so I didn’t have to do any self-reflection at all while reading this book, which is always nice.
Ha.
No, there were lots of interesting things in these pages that did make me think about my own biases. And just like parts of Cultish reminded me of The Coddling of the American Mind, so too, did this book. She should be friends with Jonathan Haidt if she isn’t already. CBT buddies. (That sounds like drugs but it’s not.)
As many critical reviewers pointed out: cognitive biases are not a new phenomenon and you’ve probably heard of most of the ones she talks about— although I will say the IKEA effect was new to me. But that’s the sneaky thing about cognitive biases; they are triggered in our thinking when we don’t even realize it. I think we all need to be thinking more about how we think. What is that, meta thinking? Oh, I was close. It’s metacognition; just looked it up.
Let’s be more metacognitive!!
Montell describes it this way:
“We’re living in what they call the ‘Information Age’, but life only seems to be making less sense. We’re isolated, listless, burnt out on screens, cutting loved ones out like tumors in the spirit of ‘boundaries’, failing to understand other people’s choices or even our own…
Faced with a sudden glut of information, cognitive biases cause the modern mind to overthink and underthink the wrong things. We obsess unproductively over the same paranoias, but we blitz past complex deliberations that deserve more care.”
The Biases
Using a lot of personal stories and confessions, she explores these biases:
- the halo effect: “deceives the unconscious tendency to make positive assumptions about a person’s overall character based on our impressions of one single trait”
- proportionality bias: “fools even the most rational minds into overestimating cause-and-effect relationships…In virtually every context, we cannot seem to rest until we find some intentional force either to fault for our misery or credit for our success. The greater the effect, the greater we desire the cause to be.”
- sunk cost fallacy: “the deeply ingrained conviction that spending resources you can’t get back (money, time, emotional resources) justifies spending even more”
- zero-sum bias: “the false intuition that another party’s gain directly means your loss”
- survivorship bias: “propensity to focus on positive outcomes while ignoring any accompanying misfortunes… beckons thinkers to draw incorrect conclusions about ‘why’ something turned out well by fixating too narrowly on the people or objects that made it past a certain benchmark, while overlooking those that didn’t”
- recency illusion: “the tendency to assume that something is objectively new, and thus threatening, simply because it’s new to you… that something only just happened because you only just happened to notice it”
- overconfidence bias: “people overvalue their actual skills, express excessive certainty in their evaluations, and over credit themselves with positive outcomes”
- illusory truth effect: “our penchant to trust a statement as factual simply because we’ve heard it multiple times. Like how we thought if we swallowed gum it would take 7 years to digest. This is how political propaganda is able to spread so effortlessly.”
- confirmation bias: “characterized by a universal tendency to favor information that validates our existing views and discard that which refutes them”
- declinism: “the false impression that things are worse now than they were in the past, and it’s all downhill from here” [partners with fading effect bias where, with the exception of severe trauma, we tend to only remember the good things]
- the IKEA effect: “propensity to ascribe disproportionately high worth to items we helped create”
Her use of personal anecdotes have many reviewers upset, claiming this book to be ‘too memoirish’. Apparently they were looking for a textbook?
I, personally, liked the way she used her own life because it shows that she was writing with honesty and her own self-reflection. Even though I think she has a few blindspots (don’t we all?) I think it adds an authenticity to the book that is often missing in more scholarly work. If we are to take to heart the warnings she offers, isn’t it easier to take her advice if we see she’s taken her own advice and applied these personally?
I also like the more memoirish writing voice because it made it more enjoyable to read. I’m sure there are more scientific books out there that talk about these more in-depth but I bet it’s a slower, more boring read. I found her writing voice had a whimsy and humor to it that also made the book more relatable.
Another ‘memoirsh’ element that caused negative reviews were the ‘disjointedness’ and ‘click bait’-edness of the chapters. I don’t know if I disagree with this observation because the book didn’t have a great flow from chapter to chapter and some of the titles do seem like click-bait. However, it didn’t bother me. It didn’t feel disjointed because it was like- ‘Okay, we did that one, let’s move on to the next.’ I think the concept of the book requires that disjointedness because it’s not necessarily a cohesive string of thought. There may be some overlap in the biases but they are largely different spheres of thinking.
It seems a lot of people really just wanted Montell to stop being transparent and interesting.
I was cool with it.
Resonations
So what are the big takeaways or things that stood out to me?
The halo effect talks about celebrity worship. We put people we don’t really even know on pedestals and we shape a lot of our worldview on who they are, what they say, what they do, acting as if we really do know them. Taylor Swift was the main example given, but we see this all the time with influencers and people that are followed on Instagram. We forget that the public view is highly curated. We don’t really know them; they don’t really know us.
She cited a 2003 survey (results would probably be more intensified nowadays) that found “those who ‘worshiped’ people they really knew, like parents and teachers who could make tangible contributions to their lives, had overall higher self-esteem and educational achievement. Glorifying pop stars and athletes predicted the opposite—lower confidence, weaker sense of self.”
Here’s the thing. (And these are extra-book thoughts, not Montell’s) We were made to worship. Everyone worships something. It might be a pop star. It might be yourself. We can’t help but worship and idolize things. Some have called people ‘idol factories.’ But we were never meant to worship created things.
The apostle Paul wrote “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever.” [Rm 1:25]
I thought it interesting that she says this,
“In both private and public spheres, worship is dehumanizing. To be deified is not so flattering; the dynamic risks annihilating a person’s room for complexity and blunders, and this sets up everyone for suffering.”
I’m not sure if dehumanizing is the right word, but we are created beings, and so we were never meant to bear the weight of another’s worship. We can’t live up to that scrutiny or deserve that praise.
When we worship the Creator, aligning ourselves and our belief with his consistent, reliable, and trustworthy truth, imitating Jesus who is our ultimate example, we will not be let down like the failings and shortcomings of fallible humans. We will not be whiplashed back and forth on the winds of trends or emotions.
----
“I’m 2018, MIT found that true stories take six times longer to reach 1500 people on Twitter than false ones. That’s because ‘false news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information.’”
This is particularly relevant today. I don’t know how many times I see certain articles or headlines shared by people online with very passionate opinions and reactions only to find out later they had false information.
This also ties into the illusory truth effect because people think just because multiple people told them the same thing, it must be true, without considering the source of that information.
I think when splashy headlines hit our screens, instead of jumping on the bandwagon to be relevant and share our hot take, we should be more hesitant and wait it out. Do more digging. Just because a headline is repeated, new to you, or everywhere, does not mean it’s true.
----
I thought her sharing her experience with an emotionally abusive boyfriend in terms of sunk-cost fallacy was really important. I think it’s true that a lot of people stay in abusive or just bad relationships because they don’t want to admit that they’ve wasted so much of their time, resources, or love and can’t bear ‘leaving it behind.’
It’s sometimes hard to not see that ‘getting out’ doesn’t mean losing. This is obviously an economic principle to heed, but can also be applied to relationships.
Her message to others who might be in the same type of relationships as her is this:
“It’s okay to be ‘disloyal’ to someone who is hurting you… it is never an unreasonable time to stop and ask of your relationship: who is this person for whom I’m rewriting my story? Not who were they seven years ago or who do I hope they’ll be, but who are they right now?’”
Montell is critical of the government’s “unquestionably pro-marriage policies” and world religions that are “critical of divorce.” This was something I needed to reflect on. From my perspective, it’s not marriage that’s the problem. Marriage, rightly ordered, is beneficial and for human and societal flourishing. I think it’s that marriage isn’t taken seriously anymore. I think if marriage was seen more as the covenant relationship it is, defined by the One who Created it, people would spend more time preparing for it and investing in it.
Of course, even Jesus allows for divorce in certain circumstances, though it wasn’t originally meant to be that way. It gets tricky to write in black and white what circumstances merit a divorce and is a conversation for another time, but I think at least infidelity and abuse would count as breaking the covenant and freeing a person to divorce. I know the church must answer for the times they’ve kept women in abusive marriages for the sake of perserving a marriage, but I’ll plug here this organization that I believe is doing a lot to aid in correcting this.
There is more here that could be talked about, but the main point is that we should be thinking of our relationships in terms of the present, not who we think they could be and that we should not allow the sunk-cost fallacy to keep us in a place of harm because we falsely believe the alternative would mean admitting defeat.
----
Along those same lines I thought it was really interesting when she shared the study that asked participants to look at two sets of colored blocks on the table and make them symmetrical. Most of the participants added new blocks to achieve symmetry. Very few removed blocks. This was classified as additive solution bias.
“When presented with a problem, most people naturally think the cause must be that something is missing, rather than that something is gratuitous or out of place.”
So whether it’s a relationship with a person or struggling with fatigue or stress, we tend to look for solutions that ‘add’ something— we just need to go on more dates together, I just need to take more calming vitamins or take an exercise class— instead of considering that maybe we need to remove something from the equation— a relationship with that person, not staying up so late or having my phone in my bedroom or not letting the kids be in so many activities.
----
Another thing that resonated with me was her thoughts on awe.
“Learning about black holes and lightyears feels like therapy to us, too sensitive teenagers turned overthinking adults, who need regular reminders of how puny we are. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why people in L.A. can be so self-centered: The narcissism isn’t innate, there’s just too much light pollution to see the stars.”
I couldn’t help but think of Thaddeus Williams’ book ‘Don’t Follow Your Heart.’ In his chapter called #Liveyourbestlife he challenges the reader on self-worship citing that and lack of awe as being culprits for joy-robbers.
He says, “Theology and science agree— the more awe we experience, the more satisfyingly human we become. We don’t just want to be awestruck, we need to be awestruck… Self-worship leaves us awe less and empty because we aren’t nearly as awesome as we like to think.”
Montell reflects on how nature inspires her and leaves her in awe. Could it be that she has seen some of the evidence of a Being who could have created that?
Even secularist, Jonathan Haidt (Montell’s future BFF) spoke of the need for awe in his book The Anxious Generation, going as far as to say that he agrees with Pascal who said “there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart.”
He quotes Dacher who said, “[awe] causes shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning.”
Haidt observes, “There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”
I think it’s curious that even people like Haidt and Montell, who don’t necessarily believe in God, still recognize humanity’s need for ‘awe.’ There is no other compelling reason for that except that we were made to worship and be in awe of the One who created us and everything around us. Any other explanation leaves us empty.
----
I think one of the most convicting things she talks about in her book was in the Overconfidence chapter. In an age of information, answers are always at our fingertips making us think we know more than we do.
I am a question-asker, an answer-finder, a truth-seeker. Although my Google history is probably embarrassing, it would no doubt expose how much I need to know things. Even things that don’t really matter much.
But maybe life should have more mystery. She suggests:
“Next time we have a question, let’s hold out for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer… It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to know.”
To not even dare to know. To not know what other movie that guy was in. To be unsure how a roller coaster works or why a platypus lays eggs. To just be okay with not knowing the answer. I’m having a hard time imagining that, but I think it would lead to some good humility and some good awe, both of which will remind me that I worship the God who does know everything and I can trust him with all the mysteries of life.
Google chisels away at our awe, our humility, and our trust.
The Behemoth
My main criticism is a behemoth of a topic that usually causes angst and division so I hesitate to even put it here, but I’m not one to shy away from many controversies and it directly ties to her claims so I’m going for it.
I don't have room here for the rest of my review so click
HERE
to see my full review that contains:
- my main criticism
- my minor criticisms
- book club discussion questions
- some words I learned
Recommendation
Even if this isn’t a scientific textbook about cognitive biases, I think it’s still a great and easy book to read that challenges you to think about the ways you think.
If you find yourself skeptical of reading it, I would recommend reading it in a group or with a friend to discuss and ask questions of each other (perhaps use my question suggestions above).
I think the main strength of this book is in reflection and application. I don’t have the same worldview or theology of Montell, but I don’t have to in order to put my own thoughts and beliefs under a microscope.
You may not agree with everything she says, but it never hurts to recalibrate our thought process and evaluate our methods of knowing truth.
I’m a big fan of finding truth and I think this book helps to that end.
[Content Advisory: a handful of f- and s-words]
I guess I was a little surprised by all the negative reviews for this book. Probably because I wasn’t coming into this book expecting a scholarly work or even a perspective I completely agreed with. I felt like it met my expectations.
I think the idea that people are irrational overthinkers intrigued me because I like to try to understand why people reach different conclusions or decisions than I would, especially when the choices don’t make any sense to me. Of course, I never have cognitive biases so I didn’t have to do any self-reflection at all while reading this book, which is always nice.
Ha.
No, there were lots of interesting things in these pages that did make me think about my own biases. And just like parts of Cultish reminded me of The Coddling of the American Mind, so too, did this book. She should be friends with Jonathan Haidt if she isn’t already. CBT buddies. (That sounds like drugs but it’s not.)
As many critical reviewers pointed out: cognitive biases are not a new phenomenon and you’ve probably heard of most of the ones she talks about— although I will say the IKEA effect was new to me. But that’s the sneaky thing about cognitive biases; they are triggered in our thinking when we don’t even realize it. I think we all need to be thinking more about how we think. What is that, meta thinking? Oh, I was close. It’s metacognition; just looked it up.
Let’s be more metacognitive!!
Montell describes it this way:
“We’re living in what they call the ‘Information Age’, but life only seems to be making less sense. We’re isolated, listless, burnt out on screens, cutting loved ones out like tumors in the spirit of ‘boundaries’, failing to understand other people’s choices or even our own…
Faced with a sudden glut of information, cognitive biases cause the modern mind to overthink and underthink the wrong things. We obsess unproductively over the same paranoias, but we blitz past complex deliberations that deserve more care.”
The Biases
Using a lot of personal stories and confessions, she explores these biases:
- the halo effect: “deceives the unconscious tendency to make positive assumptions about a person’s overall character based on our impressions of one single trait”
- proportionality bias: “fools even the most rational minds into overestimating cause-and-effect relationships…In virtually every context, we cannot seem to rest until we find some intentional force either to fault for our misery or credit for our success. The greater the effect, the greater we desire the cause to be.”
- sunk cost fallacy: “the deeply ingrained conviction that spending resources you can’t get back (money, time, emotional resources) justifies spending even more”
- zero-sum bias: “the false intuition that another party’s gain directly means your loss”
- survivorship bias: “propensity to focus on positive outcomes while ignoring any accompanying misfortunes… beckons thinkers to draw incorrect conclusions about ‘why’ something turned out well by fixating too narrowly on the people or objects that made it past a certain benchmark, while overlooking those that didn’t”
- recency illusion: “the tendency to assume that something is objectively new, and thus threatening, simply because it’s new to you… that something only just happened because you only just happened to notice it”
- overconfidence bias: “people overvalue their actual skills, express excessive certainty in their evaluations, and over credit themselves with positive outcomes”
- illusory truth effect: “our penchant to trust a statement as factual simply because we’ve heard it multiple times. Like how we thought if we swallowed gum it would take 7 years to digest. This is how political propaganda is able to spread so effortlessly.”
- confirmation bias: “characterized by a universal tendency to favor information that validates our existing views and discard that which refutes them”
- declinism: “the false impression that things are worse now than they were in the past, and it’s all downhill from here” [partners with fading effect bias where, with the exception of severe trauma, we tend to only remember the good things]
- the IKEA effect: “propensity to ascribe disproportionately high worth to items we helped create”
Her use of personal anecdotes have many reviewers upset, claiming this book to be ‘too memoirish’. Apparently they were looking for a textbook?
I, personally, liked the way she used her own life because it shows that she was writing with honesty and her own self-reflection. Even though I think she has a few blindspots (don’t we all?) I think it adds an authenticity to the book that is often missing in more scholarly work. If we are to take to heart the warnings she offers, isn’t it easier to take her advice if we see she’s taken her own advice and applied these personally?
I also like the more memoirish writing voice because it made it more enjoyable to read. I’m sure there are more scientific books out there that talk about these more in-depth but I bet it’s a slower, more boring read. I found her writing voice had a whimsy and humor to it that also made the book more relatable.
Another ‘memoirsh’ element that caused negative reviews were the ‘disjointedness’ and ‘click bait’-edness of the chapters. I don’t know if I disagree with this observation because the book didn’t have a great flow from chapter to chapter and some of the titles do seem like click-bait. However, it didn’t bother me. It didn’t feel disjointed because it was like- ‘Okay, we did that one, let’s move on to the next.’ I think the concept of the book requires that disjointedness because it’s not necessarily a cohesive string of thought. There may be some overlap in the biases but they are largely different spheres of thinking.
It seems a lot of people really just wanted Montell to stop being transparent and interesting.
I was cool with it.
Resonations
So what are the big takeaways or things that stood out to me?
The halo effect talks about celebrity worship. We put people we don’t really even know on pedestals and we shape a lot of our worldview on who they are, what they say, what they do, acting as if we really do know them. Taylor Swift was the main example given, but we see this all the time with influencers and people that are followed on Instagram. We forget that the public view is highly curated. We don’t really know them; they don’t really know us.
She cited a 2003 survey (results would probably be more intensified nowadays) that found “those who ‘worshiped’ people they really knew, like parents and teachers who could make tangible contributions to their lives, had overall higher self-esteem and educational achievement. Glorifying pop stars and athletes predicted the opposite—lower confidence, weaker sense of self.”
Here’s the thing. (And these are extra-book thoughts, not Montell’s) We were made to worship. Everyone worships something. It might be a pop star. It might be yourself. We can’t help but worship and idolize things. Some have called people ‘idol factories.’ But we were never meant to worship created things.
The apostle Paul wrote “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever.” [Rm 1:25]
I thought it interesting that she says this,
“In both private and public spheres, worship is dehumanizing. To be deified is not so flattering; the dynamic risks annihilating a person’s room for complexity and blunders, and this sets up everyone for suffering.”
I’m not sure if dehumanizing is the right word, but we are created beings, and so we were never meant to bear the weight of another’s worship. We can’t live up to that scrutiny or deserve that praise.
When we worship the Creator, aligning ourselves and our belief with his consistent, reliable, and trustworthy truth, imitating Jesus who is our ultimate example, we will not be let down like the failings and shortcomings of fallible humans. We will not be whiplashed back and forth on the winds of trends or emotions.
----
“I’m 2018, MIT found that true stories take six times longer to reach 1500 people on Twitter than false ones. That’s because ‘false news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information.’”
This is particularly relevant today. I don’t know how many times I see certain articles or headlines shared by people online with very passionate opinions and reactions only to find out later they had false information.
This also ties into the illusory truth effect because people think just because multiple people told them the same thing, it must be true, without considering the source of that information.
I think when splashy headlines hit our screens, instead of jumping on the bandwagon to be relevant and share our hot take, we should be more hesitant and wait it out. Do more digging. Just because a headline is repeated, new to you, or everywhere, does not mean it’s true.
----
I thought her sharing her experience with an emotionally abusive boyfriend in terms of sunk-cost fallacy was really important. I think it’s true that a lot of people stay in abusive or just bad relationships because they don’t want to admit that they’ve wasted so much of their time, resources, or love and can’t bear ‘leaving it behind.’
It’s sometimes hard to not see that ‘getting out’ doesn’t mean losing. This is obviously an economic principle to heed, but can also be applied to relationships.
Her message to others who might be in the same type of relationships as her is this:
“It’s okay to be ‘disloyal’ to someone who is hurting you… it is never an unreasonable time to stop and ask of your relationship: who is this person for whom I’m rewriting my story? Not who were they seven years ago or who do I hope they’ll be, but who are they right now?’”
Montell is critical of the government’s “unquestionably pro-marriage policies” and world religions that are “critical of divorce.” This was something I needed to reflect on. From my perspective, it’s not marriage that’s the problem. Marriage, rightly ordered, is beneficial and for human and societal flourishing. I think it’s that marriage isn’t taken seriously anymore. I think if marriage was seen more as the covenant relationship it is, defined by the One who Created it, people would spend more time preparing for it and investing in it.
Of course, even Jesus allows for divorce in certain circumstances, though it wasn’t originally meant to be that way. It gets tricky to write in black and white what circumstances merit a divorce and is a conversation for another time, but I think at least infidelity and abuse would count as breaking the covenant and freeing a person to divorce. I know the church must answer for the times they’ve kept women in abusive marriages for the sake of perserving a marriage, but I’ll plug here this organization that I believe is doing a lot to aid in correcting this.
There is more here that could be talked about, but the main point is that we should be thinking of our relationships in terms of the present, not who we think they could be and that we should not allow the sunk-cost fallacy to keep us in a place of harm because we falsely believe the alternative would mean admitting defeat.
----
Along those same lines I thought it was really interesting when she shared the study that asked participants to look at two sets of colored blocks on the table and make them symmetrical. Most of the participants added new blocks to achieve symmetry. Very few removed blocks. This was classified as additive solution bias.
“When presented with a problem, most people naturally think the cause must be that something is missing, rather than that something is gratuitous or out of place.”
So whether it’s a relationship with a person or struggling with fatigue or stress, we tend to look for solutions that ‘add’ something— we just need to go on more dates together, I just need to take more calming vitamins or take an exercise class— instead of considering that maybe we need to remove something from the equation— a relationship with that person, not staying up so late or having my phone in my bedroom or not letting the kids be in so many activities.
----
Another thing that resonated with me was her thoughts on awe.
“Learning about black holes and lightyears feels like therapy to us, too sensitive teenagers turned overthinking adults, who need regular reminders of how puny we are. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why people in L.A. can be so self-centered: The narcissism isn’t innate, there’s just too much light pollution to see the stars.”
I couldn’t help but think of Thaddeus Williams’ book ‘Don’t Follow Your Heart.’ In his chapter called #Liveyourbestlife he challenges the reader on self-worship citing that and lack of awe as being culprits for joy-robbers.
He says, “Theology and science agree— the more awe we experience, the more satisfyingly human we become. We don’t just want to be awestruck, we need to be awestruck… Self-worship leaves us awe less and empty because we aren’t nearly as awesome as we like to think.”
Montell reflects on how nature inspires her and leaves her in awe. Could it be that she has seen some of the evidence of a Being who could have created that?
Even secularist, Jonathan Haidt (Montell’s future BFF) spoke of the need for awe in his book The Anxious Generation, going as far as to say that he agrees with Pascal who said “there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart.”
He quotes Dacher who said, “[awe] causes shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning.”
Haidt observes, “There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”
I think it’s curious that even people like Haidt and Montell, who don’t necessarily believe in God, still recognize humanity’s need for ‘awe.’ There is no other compelling reason for that except that we were made to worship and be in awe of the One who created us and everything around us. Any other explanation leaves us empty.
----
I think one of the most convicting things she talks about in her book was in the Overconfidence chapter. In an age of information, answers are always at our fingertips making us think we know more than we do.
I am a question-asker, an answer-finder, a truth-seeker. Although my Google history is probably embarrassing, it would no doubt expose how much I need to know things. Even things that don’t really matter much.
But maybe life should have more mystery. She suggests:
“Next time we have a question, let’s hold out for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer… It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to know.”
To not even dare to know. To not know what other movie that guy was in. To be unsure how a roller coaster works or why a platypus lays eggs. To just be okay with not knowing the answer. I’m having a hard time imagining that, but I think it would lead to some good humility and some good awe, both of which will remind me that I worship the God who does know everything and I can trust him with all the mysteries of life.
Google chisels away at our awe, our humility, and our trust.
The Behemoth
My main criticism is a behemoth of a topic that usually causes angst and division so I hesitate to even put it here, but I’m not one to shy away from many controversies and it directly ties to her claims so I’m going for it.
I don't have room here for the rest of my review so click
HERE
to see my full review that contains:
- my main criticism
- my minor criticisms
- book club discussion questions
- some words I learned
Recommendation
Even if this isn’t a scientific textbook about cognitive biases, I think it’s still a great and easy book to read that challenges you to think about the ways you think.
If you find yourself skeptical of reading it, I would recommend reading it in a group or with a friend to discuss and ask questions of each other (perhaps use my question suggestions above).
I think the main strength of this book is in reflection and application. I don’t have the same worldview or theology of Montell, but I don’t have to in order to put my own thoughts and beliefs under a microscope.
You may not agree with everything she says, but it never hurts to recalibrate our thought process and evaluate our methods of knowing truth.
I’m a big fan of finding truth and I think this book helps to that end.
[Content Advisory: a handful of f- and s-words]
A Chain of Pearls by Raemi A. Ray
mysterious
medium-paced
3.5
I didn’t have much to go off of with this book. This was Ray’s debut novel so I didn’t really know about her or what to expect.
Overall, I wouldn’t say this book knocked my socks off, but it was a decent read— more of a cozy mystery.
I liked the Martha’s Vineyard setting where it’s this island set apart from the mainland where people are wary of outsiders. It makes it a little more interesting on who may be the culprit and who is just keeping someone else’s secrets.
I think the main thing I didn’t like was that the mystery felt too straightforward. You kinda find out the main ‘players’ early in the story— you don’t know exactly who did what when, but the corruption aspect was exposed too early in my opinion. I wish there had been some other major players in the mix to create more red herrings.
I also just realized that I’m not sure why the book is called ‘A Chain of Pearls’. It’s possible I just don’t remember because I’m writing this review several days after finishing, but it seems odd it’s not more obvious. Is it a play on words that the pearls, representing wealth and privilege, are also a chain, representing lack of freedom? Hm. Not sure how it connects. No one was strangled by a chain of pearls so….
The basic premise is this:
Kyra’s mother passed away when she was young. Her dad dealt with the grief by investing heavily in his global journalistic work, leaving Kyra to live with an aunt in London. They’ve had a strained relationship ever since. Then Kyra learns that her dad died in a boat accident on the Martha’s Vineyard island.
When she arrives to deal with his affairs she sees that he may not have really been retired, but actually working on a story unfolding on the island. It may be that his accident was actually a murder. She can’t restore her relationship with her dad anymore, but she can finish what he started.
She ends up (unofficially) partnering up with the local detective working (not working?) the case— Tarek— to find out what really happened to her dad and who was responsible.
One thing I wasn’t sure I was onboard with was how Kyra basically functioned like the detective. The information Tarek shared with her about bank accounts etc. seems like a major breach of his job. She was never cleared by anyone in his office but took part in virtually every aspect of the investigation. It seemed less like Kyra provided Tarek with some leads or evidence of her dad’s and more like she was sending Tarek out to do her bidding and check on her hunches and get her the info she needed to figure it out.
I also feel like there may have been a missed opportunity for a twist when it came to the neighbors. I don’t think this is a major spoiler but if you’re worried about that, just skip this paragraph. I think it would have been a good twist if one of the neighbors, either one really, had actually been involved. They were so ‘close’ to her dad so they had access and knowledge about what he was investigating. Charlie had been involved in the purchase of his house and could easily have bugged it or something like that. It would have been clever that they could easily have lied to Kyra about how close they actually were with him to get information from her. It’s the whole ‘the people you’d least suspect’ kind of thing that I think would have added some excitement. But they just got to be the friendly neighbors who are sweet as could be. Since this is a series, I’m guessing Raemi has plans for developing their relationship with Kyra in the next book and couldn’t kill the friendship off. Too bad.
Recommendation
If you’re looking for a cozy mystery, you’ll probably enjoy this book, however if you are more into twisty thrillers, this one might be a bit too boring for you.
I have the second one in the series so I’ll probably read that one too eventually and see if the writing style/content changes at all. Based on the reviews it appears that those who loved the first book also loved the second one. Plus it has a pirate ship and treasure so that sounds exciting.
At the very least, this series could function as an easy palette cleanser in between the more intense thrillers on your shelf.
[Content Advisory: 39 f-words (a good chunk of these were probably in the last 40ish pages), 17 s-words; a few LGBTQ characters]
**Received a copy via Author Marketing Experts in exchange for an honest review**
Overall, I wouldn’t say this book knocked my socks off, but it was a decent read— more of a cozy mystery.
I liked the Martha’s Vineyard setting where it’s this island set apart from the mainland where people are wary of outsiders. It makes it a little more interesting on who may be the culprit and who is just keeping someone else’s secrets.
I think the main thing I didn’t like was that the mystery felt too straightforward. You kinda find out the main ‘players’ early in the story— you don’t know exactly who did what when, but the corruption aspect was exposed too early in my opinion. I wish there had been some other major players in the mix to create more red herrings.
I also just realized that I’m not sure why the book is called ‘A Chain of Pearls’. It’s possible I just don’t remember because I’m writing this review several days after finishing, but it seems odd it’s not more obvious. Is it a play on words that the pearls, representing wealth and privilege, are also a chain, representing lack of freedom? Hm. Not sure how it connects. No one was strangled by a chain of pearls so….
The basic premise is this:
Kyra’s mother passed away when she was young. Her dad dealt with the grief by investing heavily in his global journalistic work, leaving Kyra to live with an aunt in London. They’ve had a strained relationship ever since. Then Kyra learns that her dad died in a boat accident on the Martha’s Vineyard island.
When she arrives to deal with his affairs she sees that he may not have really been retired, but actually working on a story unfolding on the island. It may be that his accident was actually a murder. She can’t restore her relationship with her dad anymore, but she can finish what he started.
She ends up (unofficially) partnering up with the local detective working (not working?) the case— Tarek— to find out what really happened to her dad and who was responsible.
One thing I wasn’t sure I was onboard with was how Kyra basically functioned like the detective. The information Tarek shared with her about bank accounts etc. seems like a major breach of his job. She was never cleared by anyone in his office but took part in virtually every aspect of the investigation. It seemed less like Kyra provided Tarek with some leads or evidence of her dad’s and more like she was sending Tarek out to do her bidding and check on her hunches and get her the info she needed to figure it out.
I also feel like there may have been a missed opportunity for a twist when it came to the neighbors. I don’t think this is a major spoiler but if you’re worried about that, just skip this paragraph. I think it would have been a good twist if one of the neighbors, either one really, had actually been involved. They were so ‘close’ to her dad so they had access and knowledge about what he was investigating. Charlie had been involved in the purchase of his house and could easily have bugged it or something like that. It would have been clever that they could easily have lied to Kyra about how close they actually were with him to get information from her. It’s the whole ‘the people you’d least suspect’ kind of thing that I think would have added some excitement. But they just got to be the friendly neighbors who are sweet as could be. Since this is a series, I’m guessing Raemi has plans for developing their relationship with Kyra in the next book and couldn’t kill the friendship off. Too bad.
Recommendation
If you’re looking for a cozy mystery, you’ll probably enjoy this book, however if you are more into twisty thrillers, this one might be a bit too boring for you.
I have the second one in the series so I’ll probably read that one too eventually and see if the writing style/content changes at all. Based on the reviews it appears that those who loved the first book also loved the second one. Plus it has a pirate ship and treasure so that sounds exciting.
At the very least, this series could function as an easy palette cleanser in between the more intense thrillers on your shelf.
[Content Advisory: 39 f-words (a good chunk of these were probably in the last 40ish pages), 17 s-words; a few LGBTQ characters]
**Received a copy via Author Marketing Experts in exchange for an honest review**
Content Warnings
Moderate: Cursing
Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
5.0
“to tell your story was to experience a kind of freedom…”
“This was the true miracle of life, he thought. No so much to be born as to bear up under what comes your way. To find a way forward. To embrace what was good.”
This one was hard to put down. It is a well-crafted story that explores grief and trauma and the way family history shapes our identities.
I have not read Wilkerson’s debut novel, the highly rated novel called Black Cake, but it seems like similar themes probably flow through both books. I think this one would probably make a good book club book so I’ve included a list of potential book club discussion questions at the end of this review for anyone interested in that.
I will say that there is a lot going on in this book. The chapters are short, helping with the pacing and the ‘hard to put down’ part, but also helping with all the various POVs and the historic timelines. The main characters are evident and have more space in the book, but many other characters are introduced and then will get a brief chapter focused on them— probably could have had less of that.
I didn’t find it too hard to follow. It helps that Wilkerson tended to make the first sentence say the name of whatever character’s POV it was from so you knew right away where you were. The chapters that took place in the 1800s was the harder timeline to grasp in lining things up in your head, but even then, still not too bad.
I enjoyed the themes in this book and found many of them thought-provoking. I also appreciated that there was an ongoing ‘mystery’ aspect to the story that gave an extra thread of engagement.
Plot Basics
The book begins in 2000 as we witness the tragic home invasion of the Freeman house in Massachusetts where not only their cherished family heirloom (a jar thrown by an enslaved potter in the 1800s) is broken but ten-year-old Ebony’s brother Baz is shot and killed at the young age of fifteen.
They are the only two home and Ebby was the one who called 911 as she watched her brother die. The trauma of that does not go away easily. It didn’t help that as one of the only black families in the wealthy neighborhood, and her family being well-known in general, the spotlight never truly leaves them. She feels always known as “the little black girl who had survived a suburban tragedy.”
The spotlight, then, shines ever brighter as the twentieth anniversary of Baz’s death is on the horizon and Ebby is shockingly stood up on her wedding day with no communication of her would-be husband.
“Henry Pepper had shown the world that Ebony Freeman, try as she might, could not escape the mantle of misfortune that had settled over her.”
The bulk of the book takes place here with Ebby still haunted by her brother’s unsolved murder and now publicly humiliated by Henry’s abandonment at the altar. Ebby has to get away and 8 months later, has taken up her friend’s offer to stay in her cottage in a small village in France. To process. To regroup. Maybe to write.
The chapters set in the past are these writings: the jar stories. Stories about the jar’s history that is also their family history, handed down many generations. Stories that tell of perseverance, courage, bravery, love, skill, and hope.
When Henry shows up with another woman to rent the guest cottage of the property, Ebby is forced to confront the past in more ways then she anticipated. Her family tragedy, the jar, and her ruined vows all clash and Ebby has to find a way to move forward.
The Jar— Old Mo
“‘The great strength of that jar was that its true worth was underestimated. Just like the value of the enslaved man who had crafted it and signed it at a time when people in bondage were not allowed to read or write.’”
There have been many books written to explore the lives and treatment of African American slaves, but Wilkerson wanted to touch on a couple areas of labor that are not often talked about in other books: pottery and sailing. She fuses them together in the Freeman family history.
“Granny says clay runs in their family’s blood, but Ebby’s father sees it differently. Ebby’s dad likes to say it’s the sea that courses through his veins, that he inherited a yen for the water from the sailors in his family.”
Many Africans were already skilled in pottery, creating jugs, jars, and other vessels from the clay of their homeland. When they were stolen away to America, they were forced to continue using their skills on plantation factories.
There were also many ships that used slave labor or where freed men were able to find work.
As somewhat of an artist (who’s thrown a pot or two) I was interested in this pottery aspect. Not just as a physical art form preserved through time and passed down for generations but also as a literary feature. An object fashioned and molded from the earth and then put through fire.
“Raw clay was a living thing that could be reshaped and reborn, until the potters committed it to the fire.”
I can’t help but think about how we are being shaped and molded, often enduring a refining fire. God is the Potter, and we are the clay.
Psalm 66:10-12 is one of several verses in the Bible that talk about God refining us through fire: “For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried. You brought us into the net; you laid a crushing burden on our backs; you let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance.”
Author Lysa Terkerst uses this pottery language in her book, It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way. She came to a point in life where everything felt broken but she realized that sometimes what feels like irreparable brokenness is actually preparation for something even better.
“We think the shattering in our lives could not possibly be for any good. But what if shattering is the only way to get dust back to its basic form so that something new can be made?… Dust doesn’t have to signify the end. Dust is often what must be present for the new to begin.”
Wilkerson doesn’t bring out any biblical themes in her book, but we see shadows of this idea as we see Ebby broken down, but starting fresh. We see how the fire has refined her character and made her stronger.
“Soh loves that jar more than ever. She loves to think that something that has been broken can be pieced back together.”
The last aspect of the jar that was significant were the words engraved on the bottom. They are kept a secret until the very end of the book. I was worried she was going to leave it a mystery so I’m glad she did end up revealing them.
They are most noteworthy because slaves were not allowed to read or write; to learn those skills was dangerous and could even end in death. For an enslaved potter to carve any words, let alone the ones found on Old Mo, was a deliberate act of courage and resistance. I’m not sure how Wilkerson chose the phrase she did, but it lived up to the anticipation and was worth the wait to find it out!
Overall, I really liked the significance Wilkerson made of the jar and everything connected to it. I think she could have gone even further in the symbolism, but it was an effective path to take in this book. It also definitely makes me ponder the title- Good Dirt— and how that makes a good title.
Alternative Narrative
There are certain aspects of the subtle narrative surrounding the Freeman family’s experience of ‘being black in America’ that I might have differing thoughts on. I’ll list a few quotes here as receipts:
“People saw their skin, not their history.”
“Just a month before he died, there had been yet another unjustified killing of an unarmed black man by a police officer.”
“verbal slights that Ed called microaggressions”
“We are surrounded by black scientists and doctors and lawyers and other highly skilled professionals, but still, people are surprised. They continue to be surprised at African American achievement.”
“You could not grow up to be a black man, no matter how successful, without knowing, in some quadrant of your brain, that you were more vulnerable to potential harm than other men. You had to watch your back. You had to teach your son to watch his back.”
“A young, African American man. People are always going to look for excuses to question your capacity to do things. Fair or not.”
but I don’t want to belabor the point because I don’t believe that the main spirit of this book was necessarily to paint a specific picture of present day racism and give a primary voice to that experience.
It was definitely an element of the book, but I think the more focal point was the Freemans’s ancestors being slaves and how their experiences in the 1800s filtered down to their family’s identity.
I think to spend too much time arguing about the current state of affairs, problems, or potential causes, though a worth endeavor in other cases, would take away from what I think makes this book compelling. I will refrain from being distracted by a message that I am not even confident the author is attempting to proclaim in this story.
I will only say that I have found Thomas Sowell’s book Discrimination and Disparities, Thaddeus William’s book Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth and Candace Owen’s book Blackout (among others) have been insightful in pondering thoughts surrounding racism, systemic racism, and the potential ongoing effects of slavery today.
And I will say that I wholeheartedly agree with these statements made in the book because they are perhaps the most relevant at any point in history:
“‘Most of the trouble in this world boils down to one person not recognizing the worth of another.’”
“There will always be men willing to steal the freedom of others if they think it’ll bring them an advantage.”
I hope we can spend more time recognizing the worth of others before we speak or act, online or in person. That’s the first and most effective way to combat today’s troubles. See each other as image-bearers of God, our Creator.
Other Reviewers
In looking at some of the negative reviews for this book I can summarize that a lot of them felt the book dragged on and they didn’t really care for the jar or its story. I can see how it would be long if you were not interested in that timeline at all. I do think there was some repetitive content, but I liked that element of the story and so it didn’t drag for me. I’m also not sure that a lot of them really saw the connection between the pottery process and the shaping of Ebby’s life and maybe that would have made a difference for them in appreciating that thread of the story.
Others comment on the over-hyped ‘secrets’ of the book and the overuse of miscommunication to drum up drama. I didn’t necessarily feel this while reading, but after the fact I can look back and say, they do have a bit of a point. Some of the ‘secrets’ weren’t very earth-shattering after all, and I am never a fan of characters who are unwilling to allow anyone to explain anything. I’m a person who desires answers and truth and even if I’m ticked at someone, I think I would be too curious about their explanation to shut it down in spite.
The mystery aspect was, of course, nice to have, but it’s definitely not the driving force of the plot so if you’re going into it thinking you’re ‘on the case’ I can see how you might feel misled reading this book and have a bad taste in your mouth. The mystery is there but it’s definitely a subplot.
Of course you have an array of opinions on what characters people liked and didn’t like and that’s largely personal preference and what resonates with you. I, personally, didn’t feel like there were any characters that were major make or breaks.
All the Feels
I think one of the things that might resonate with me for awhile— which may be a little random— is from Grandma Bliss:
“Hold the moment. Before Ebby had ever heard the term mindfulness, Grandma Bliss had a grasp on the concept. Be aware of a beautiful moment as it is happening. Take note of your life as you are living it.”
Life is hectic and busy and we survive and we keep moving forward and the days go by and the years go by and then our kids aren’t babies anymore, and then our kids aren’t toddlers anymore and sometimes you do just need to hold the moment.
I have done this periodically already, but I didn’t have these words for those times. I love the ‘hold the moment’ phrase and the taking note of life as you are living it in that moment. To just really sit there and take it all in and think about what was before and what is to come and why this moment is precious.
Sitting and holding those moments will solidify them more in my memories and I hope to have a lot of moments to look back on and love— the way they form their words, the way their eyes light up when talking about something they love, their chubby fingers and little adult-like gestures and mannerisms, the way their little bodies fold into mine when we snuggle, the crumbs of food that never seem to come off their mouth, the way they say ‘mama’ or want to hold me hand. Hold all those moments.
Book Club Discussion Questions
1. Is there something that threads through your family history or a cherished family heirloom?
2. Have you experienced a time in your life where something felt shattered? How have you seen something new built from that dust? How has that ‘fire’ made you stronger?
3. Which character do you identify with the most?
4. Ebby remembers the little maple tree they planted that has grown, its leaves turning orange every autumn. “Then the leaves would fall away, and the tree would seal off its branches to protect itself from the onslaught of winter.” How is Ebby like this tree?
5. Does it surprise you that Ebby could still be having nightmares from that fateful night in 2000? How do you view the process of healing after a significant loss?
6. How much influence do you think generations of family history should have on a person’s identity? What ways did this shape Ebby in a positive or negative way?
7. How are Avery and Ebby alike? How are they different? Do you think it was their similarities or their differences that drew Henry to Avery?
8. When Ebby tells Henry about her dad’s work she gives the example of the joints in a bridge and how those connections help “reduce trauma by moving back and forth under daily, monthly, and yearly pressure.” Henry likens it to trauma prevention. Ebby corrects him, “More like resilience under trauma. You can’t prevent it, but you can find ways to hold up under the pressure, to continue to function well.” In what ways did you see characters exercise resilience under trauma? What are other things they could have done? How do you define resilience? In what ways have you been resilient? (this comes from the Henry chapter after ‘Words’)
9. Why do you think the book is titled Good Dirt?
10. Ebby often changed her hair color in times of change or crises. Why do you think this was therapeutic for her? How do you identify with this aspect of Ebby’s character?
11. “How much of yourself do you have to renounce in order to have the life you think you want?” (from Chapter: Falling) What do you think of this sentiment Ebby voices?
12. Think about the five words engraved on the bottom of Old Mo. Why do you think those words would have been so inspiring to other slaves? What significance do you find for them today?
13. “Ed believes there is something at the core of each person that works like a compass. It should tell them who they are and where they belong.” Do you agree with Ed? Why or why not?
14. Do you think Ebby should have given Henry another chance?
15. When you read the Escalators chapter, what do you think is significant about Avery and Henry riding the escalators up and Ebby about to ride the escalator down? Where are their character arcs going?
16. Think about finding the closest museum that houses an object like Old Mo that you could visit and see for yourself.
Recommendation
I definitely recommend this book! Wilkerson gives readers a lot to think about and threads the themes together in such a compelling way. I can’t really think of a reason why you wouldn’t want to read this book. Even seeing what other reviewers didn’t like about the book, I’m not sure it’s enough to caution someone against reading it.
I will also recommend the book Amazing Grace that tells the story of John Newton who wrote the song Amazing Grace. It’s a hard book to read as it reveals the reality of the slave trade that Newton was once part of, but it also explains the ‘I was blind, but now I see’ line of his song. Reading about the slave trade is always hard, and I think it’s important to see the hope and the Lord at work while we are at the same time recognizing sin for what it is, setting our minds and hearts against ever being part of something so heinous.
“Where do we find hope today in the midst of deep divisions in society and violent disagreements? Where do we find hope for the human condition? Where do we find hope for all the griefs and sorrows that threaten to undo our own lives? Perhaps we need to look again at the perennial message of ‘Amazing Grace.’ Perhaps here we might find a renewed hope that however difficult the troubles in our lives, however deep our personal shame and regret, however dark the evil that stalks the earth, there is a mercy that is deeper yet, a forgiveness that makes all the difference, and a power for reconciliation greater than ourselves.” [Amazing Grace]
[Content Advisory: 4 f-words, 15 s-words; some sexual content]
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
“This was the true miracle of life, he thought. No so much to be born as to bear up under what comes your way. To find a way forward. To embrace what was good.”
This one was hard to put down. It is a well-crafted story that explores grief and trauma and the way family history shapes our identities.
I have not read Wilkerson’s debut novel, the highly rated novel called Black Cake, but it seems like similar themes probably flow through both books. I think this one would probably make a good book club book so I’ve included a list of potential book club discussion questions at the end of this review for anyone interested in that.
I will say that there is a lot going on in this book. The chapters are short, helping with the pacing and the ‘hard to put down’ part, but also helping with all the various POVs and the historic timelines. The main characters are evident and have more space in the book, but many other characters are introduced and then will get a brief chapter focused on them— probably could have had less of that.
I didn’t find it too hard to follow. It helps that Wilkerson tended to make the first sentence say the name of whatever character’s POV it was from so you knew right away where you were. The chapters that took place in the 1800s was the harder timeline to grasp in lining things up in your head, but even then, still not too bad.
I enjoyed the themes in this book and found many of them thought-provoking. I also appreciated that there was an ongoing ‘mystery’ aspect to the story that gave an extra thread of engagement.
Plot Basics
The book begins in 2000 as we witness the tragic home invasion of the Freeman house in Massachusetts where not only their cherished family heirloom (a jar thrown by an enslaved potter in the 1800s) is broken but ten-year-old Ebony’s brother Baz is shot and killed at the young age of fifteen.
They are the only two home and Ebby was the one who called 911 as she watched her brother die. The trauma of that does not go away easily. It didn’t help that as one of the only black families in the wealthy neighborhood, and her family being well-known in general, the spotlight never truly leaves them. She feels always known as “the little black girl who had survived a suburban tragedy.”
The spotlight, then, shines ever brighter as the twentieth anniversary of Baz’s death is on the horizon and Ebby is shockingly stood up on her wedding day with no communication of her would-be husband.
“Henry Pepper had shown the world that Ebony Freeman, try as she might, could not escape the mantle of misfortune that had settled over her.”
The bulk of the book takes place here with Ebby still haunted by her brother’s unsolved murder and now publicly humiliated by Henry’s abandonment at the altar. Ebby has to get away and 8 months later, has taken up her friend’s offer to stay in her cottage in a small village in France. To process. To regroup. Maybe to write.
The chapters set in the past are these writings: the jar stories. Stories about the jar’s history that is also their family history, handed down many generations. Stories that tell of perseverance, courage, bravery, love, skill, and hope.
When Henry shows up with another woman to rent the guest cottage of the property, Ebby is forced to confront the past in more ways then she anticipated. Her family tragedy, the jar, and her ruined vows all clash and Ebby has to find a way to move forward.
The Jar— Old Mo
“‘The great strength of that jar was that its true worth was underestimated. Just like the value of the enslaved man who had crafted it and signed it at a time when people in bondage were not allowed to read or write.’”
There have been many books written to explore the lives and treatment of African American slaves, but Wilkerson wanted to touch on a couple areas of labor that are not often talked about in other books: pottery and sailing. She fuses them together in the Freeman family history.
“Granny says clay runs in their family’s blood, but Ebby’s father sees it differently. Ebby’s dad likes to say it’s the sea that courses through his veins, that he inherited a yen for the water from the sailors in his family.”
Many Africans were already skilled in pottery, creating jugs, jars, and other vessels from the clay of their homeland. When they were stolen away to America, they were forced to continue using their skills on plantation factories.
There were also many ships that used slave labor or where freed men were able to find work.
As somewhat of an artist (who’s thrown a pot or two) I was interested in this pottery aspect. Not just as a physical art form preserved through time and passed down for generations but also as a literary feature. An object fashioned and molded from the earth and then put through fire.
“Raw clay was a living thing that could be reshaped and reborn, until the potters committed it to the fire.”
I can’t help but think about how we are being shaped and molded, often enduring a refining fire. God is the Potter, and we are the clay.
Psalm 66:10-12 is one of several verses in the Bible that talk about God refining us through fire: “For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried. You brought us into the net; you laid a crushing burden on our backs; you let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance.”
Author Lysa Terkerst uses this pottery language in her book, It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way. She came to a point in life where everything felt broken but she realized that sometimes what feels like irreparable brokenness is actually preparation for something even better.
“We think the shattering in our lives could not possibly be for any good. But what if shattering is the only way to get dust back to its basic form so that something new can be made?… Dust doesn’t have to signify the end. Dust is often what must be present for the new to begin.”
Wilkerson doesn’t bring out any biblical themes in her book, but we see shadows of this idea as we see Ebby broken down, but starting fresh. We see how the fire has refined her character and made her stronger.
“Soh loves that jar more than ever. She loves to think that something that has been broken can be pieced back together.”
The last aspect of the jar that was significant were the words engraved on the bottom. They are kept a secret until the very end of the book. I was worried she was going to leave it a mystery so I’m glad she did end up revealing them.
They are most noteworthy because slaves were not allowed to read or write; to learn those skills was dangerous and could even end in death. For an enslaved potter to carve any words, let alone the ones found on Old Mo, was a deliberate act of courage and resistance. I’m not sure how Wilkerson chose the phrase she did, but it lived up to the anticipation and was worth the wait to find it out!
Overall, I really liked the significance Wilkerson made of the jar and everything connected to it. I think she could have gone even further in the symbolism, but it was an effective path to take in this book. It also definitely makes me ponder the title- Good Dirt— and how that makes a good title.
Alternative Narrative
There are certain aspects of the subtle narrative surrounding the Freeman family’s experience of ‘being black in America’ that I might have differing thoughts on. I’ll list a few quotes here as receipts:
“People saw their skin, not their history.”
“Just a month before he died, there had been yet another unjustified killing of an unarmed black man by a police officer.”
“verbal slights that Ed called microaggressions”
“We are surrounded by black scientists and doctors and lawyers and other highly skilled professionals, but still, people are surprised. They continue to be surprised at African American achievement.”
“You could not grow up to be a black man, no matter how successful, without knowing, in some quadrant of your brain, that you were more vulnerable to potential harm than other men. You had to watch your back. You had to teach your son to watch his back.”
“A young, African American man. People are always going to look for excuses to question your capacity to do things. Fair or not.”
but I don’t want to belabor the point because I don’t believe that the main spirit of this book was necessarily to paint a specific picture of present day racism and give a primary voice to that experience.
It was definitely an element of the book, but I think the more focal point was the Freemans’s ancestors being slaves and how their experiences in the 1800s filtered down to their family’s identity.
I think to spend too much time arguing about the current state of affairs, problems, or potential causes, though a worth endeavor in other cases, would take away from what I think makes this book compelling. I will refrain from being distracted by a message that I am not even confident the author is attempting to proclaim in this story.
I will only say that I have found Thomas Sowell’s book Discrimination and Disparities, Thaddeus William’s book Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth and Candace Owen’s book Blackout (among others) have been insightful in pondering thoughts surrounding racism, systemic racism, and the potential ongoing effects of slavery today.
And I will say that I wholeheartedly agree with these statements made in the book because they are perhaps the most relevant at any point in history:
“‘Most of the trouble in this world boils down to one person not recognizing the worth of another.’”
“There will always be men willing to steal the freedom of others if they think it’ll bring them an advantage.”
I hope we can spend more time recognizing the worth of others before we speak or act, online or in person. That’s the first and most effective way to combat today’s troubles. See each other as image-bearers of God, our Creator.
Other Reviewers
In looking at some of the negative reviews for this book I can summarize that a lot of them felt the book dragged on and they didn’t really care for the jar or its story. I can see how it would be long if you were not interested in that timeline at all. I do think there was some repetitive content, but I liked that element of the story and so it didn’t drag for me. I’m also not sure that a lot of them really saw the connection between the pottery process and the shaping of Ebby’s life and maybe that would have made a difference for them in appreciating that thread of the story.
Others comment on the over-hyped ‘secrets’ of the book and the overuse of miscommunication to drum up drama. I didn’t necessarily feel this while reading, but after the fact I can look back and say, they do have a bit of a point. Some of the ‘secrets’ weren’t very earth-shattering after all, and I am never a fan of characters who are unwilling to allow anyone to explain anything. I’m a person who desires answers and truth and even if I’m ticked at someone, I think I would be too curious about their explanation to shut it down in spite.
The mystery aspect was, of course, nice to have, but it’s definitely not the driving force of the plot so if you’re going into it thinking you’re ‘on the case’ I can see how you might feel misled reading this book and have a bad taste in your mouth. The mystery is there but it’s definitely a subplot.
Of course you have an array of opinions on what characters people liked and didn’t like and that’s largely personal preference and what resonates with you. I, personally, didn’t feel like there were any characters that were major make or breaks.
All the Feels
I think one of the things that might resonate with me for awhile— which may be a little random— is from Grandma Bliss:
“Hold the moment. Before Ebby had ever heard the term mindfulness, Grandma Bliss had a grasp on the concept. Be aware of a beautiful moment as it is happening. Take note of your life as you are living it.”
Life is hectic and busy and we survive and we keep moving forward and the days go by and the years go by and then our kids aren’t babies anymore, and then our kids aren’t toddlers anymore and sometimes you do just need to hold the moment.
I have done this periodically already, but I didn’t have these words for those times. I love the ‘hold the moment’ phrase and the taking note of life as you are living it in that moment. To just really sit there and take it all in and think about what was before and what is to come and why this moment is precious.
Sitting and holding those moments will solidify them more in my memories and I hope to have a lot of moments to look back on and love— the way they form their words, the way their eyes light up when talking about something they love, their chubby fingers and little adult-like gestures and mannerisms, the way their little bodies fold into mine when we snuggle, the crumbs of food that never seem to come off their mouth, the way they say ‘mama’ or want to hold me hand. Hold all those moments.
Book Club Discussion Questions
1. Is there something that threads through your family history or a cherished family heirloom?
2. Have you experienced a time in your life where something felt shattered? How have you seen something new built from that dust? How has that ‘fire’ made you stronger?
3. Which character do you identify with the most?
4. Ebby remembers the little maple tree they planted that has grown, its leaves turning orange every autumn. “Then the leaves would fall away, and the tree would seal off its branches to protect itself from the onslaught of winter.” How is Ebby like this tree?
5. Does it surprise you that Ebby could still be having nightmares from that fateful night in 2000? How do you view the process of healing after a significant loss?
6. How much influence do you think generations of family history should have on a person’s identity? What ways did this shape Ebby in a positive or negative way?
7. How are Avery and Ebby alike? How are they different? Do you think it was their similarities or their differences that drew Henry to Avery?
8. When Ebby tells Henry about her dad’s work she gives the example of the joints in a bridge and how those connections help “reduce trauma by moving back and forth under daily, monthly, and yearly pressure.” Henry likens it to trauma prevention. Ebby corrects him, “More like resilience under trauma. You can’t prevent it, but you can find ways to hold up under the pressure, to continue to function well.” In what ways did you see characters exercise resilience under trauma? What are other things they could have done? How do you define resilience? In what ways have you been resilient? (this comes from the Henry chapter after ‘Words’)
9. Why do you think the book is titled Good Dirt?
10. Ebby often changed her hair color in times of change or crises. Why do you think this was therapeutic for her? How do you identify with this aspect of Ebby’s character?
11. “How much of yourself do you have to renounce in order to have the life you think you want?” (from Chapter: Falling) What do you think of this sentiment Ebby voices?
12. Think about the five words engraved on the bottom of Old Mo. Why do you think those words would have been so inspiring to other slaves? What significance do you find for them today?
13. “Ed believes there is something at the core of each person that works like a compass. It should tell them who they are and where they belong.” Do you agree with Ed? Why or why not?
14. Do you think Ebby should have given Henry another chance?
15. When you read the Escalators chapter, what do you think is significant about Avery and Henry riding the escalators up and Ebby about to ride the escalator down? Where are their character arcs going?
16. Think about finding the closest museum that houses an object like Old Mo that you could visit and see for yourself.
Recommendation
I definitely recommend this book! Wilkerson gives readers a lot to think about and threads the themes together in such a compelling way. I can’t really think of a reason why you wouldn’t want to read this book. Even seeing what other reviewers didn’t like about the book, I’m not sure it’s enough to caution someone against reading it.
I will also recommend the book Amazing Grace that tells the story of John Newton who wrote the song Amazing Grace. It’s a hard book to read as it reveals the reality of the slave trade that Newton was once part of, but it also explains the ‘I was blind, but now I see’ line of his song. Reading about the slave trade is always hard, and I think it’s important to see the hope and the Lord at work while we are at the same time recognizing sin for what it is, setting our minds and hearts against ever being part of something so heinous.
“Where do we find hope today in the midst of deep divisions in society and violent disagreements? Where do we find hope for the human condition? Where do we find hope for all the griefs and sorrows that threaten to undo our own lives? Perhaps we need to look again at the perennial message of ‘Amazing Grace.’ Perhaps here we might find a renewed hope that however difficult the troubles in our lives, however deep our personal shame and regret, however dark the evil that stalks the earth, there is a mercy that is deeper yet, a forgiveness that makes all the difference, and a power for reconciliation greater than ourselves.” [Amazing Grace]
[Content Advisory: 4 f-words, 15 s-words; some sexual content]
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**