The Boxcar Children: The Dog- Gone Mystery, The Clue in the Recycling Bin, The Radio Mystery (chapter books, secular)... I liked all three of these Boxcar Children books just fine. None of them stood out as big favorites for me but I did approve of all of them for my kiddos.
The Winter Rose (Christian historical fiction)... this is such an awesome World War II time slip! I loved this book overall but I feel like the audio version especially brought it to life for me since the narrator used such a wonderful French accent for those chapters of the book. This one is set in World War II France plus Spain and Modern Day Oregon.
Dream Big (Christian nonfiction)... I think I will love any book Bob Goff puts out there and this one is no exception. The title might lead you to think it is just about going after success or something along those lines but that is absolutely not the case and this book will work for you regardless of your stage or season of life.
House of Secrets (contemporary Christian fiction)... this is definitely not a sweet or light-hearted Christian book as this is one of those that is really examining unhealthy family Dynamics and digging up some painful family history. This one deals a lot with mental illness and a little bit with child abuse so reader beware. If you feel like this is your kind of book I think you won't be disappointed.
The Sea Keeper's Daughters (contemporary Christian fiction)... this is the third book in Lisa wingate's Carolina heirlooms series. These are all three stand-alone novels and the first two can be read in either order but I do feel like this third book needs to be read third. It would still work fine as a standalone but having read the first two books made this one that much more exciting as we get to see some later resolution come to the stories we discovered in those previous books.
The Silence Between Us (secular, young adult)... this is a blink why a novel, meaning blink published it since it is a clean read for teens. I agree with that idea and I overall really liked this book about a deaf teenage girl and her family life which includes a little brother with cystic fibrosis. She has a beautiful relationship with her mother and baby brother so I appreciated seeing that play out but I will say that this book has very minor young adult Romance and I know that a lot of you are not comfortable with that in your teens books. I don't have teens yet but I can say that overall I would really like to see more books come out that focus on other relationships. I do find it very interesting that it's actually quite difficult to find a clean young adult novel that does not contain at least some small form of romance, even in Christian fiction. When we pour something over teens over and over and over again we are the silly ones for then wishing they would choose a different path!
Anne of the Island (middle grade, secular)... the good and the Beautiful book list has approved only Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea but has said the rest of this books in this series are not up to their standards. I really liked Anne of Avonlea even though I wasn't very happy about all of the body image talk and a couple other little things but this third book I have to admit was just a big no for me. I did not care for the extreme amount of vanity from Anne's new friend and there just were a lot of little things that of course add up to become a book full of things I don't really care for. I'm not saying it was a terrible book or anything like that, I just feel like there are many other books that bring a lot more to the table so I will go ahead and leave this one off of our book lists. In a small way it feels a little bit wrong but after reading a biography on LM Montgomery a couple of years ago I have to admit that I don't think she would mind since I know that the author was not really a fan of series and wrote most of her books in hopes of them being standalones and then only begrudgingly wrote the next installments because the publishers demanded it of her.
