Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Recent Reads

Y'all, I can't even begin to thank you for the sweet love and support so many of you sent me after yesterday's crazy post. You are all amazing and I am beyond blessed <3
I have no idea if that one special person has read it yet or not but I know that they will if they haven't already. Would you do me a favor and pray for that person real quick? And then we'll take things easy today with some nice, gentle book reviews =]



Afraid of All the Things*… As someone who is dealing a lot with anxiety right now, and who has dealt with both actual anxiety and just being prone to fearfulness throughout my life, I got so much from this book. Truthfully, I think it was just plain interesting even if you don’t have any anxiety/fearfulness tendencies. Scarlet’s a great storyteller who shares about her lifetime of irrational fears, ectopic miscarriage, a second miscarriage that was initially mistaken for cancer, and a truly awesome special needs adoption story. I was so excited to finish the book and immediately discover a Scarlet interview on an episode of a Christian writing podcast I like, Home Row. I had never heard of her before this book but she is very definitely on my radar now!

The Emotion Code… This book is going to be much too new-agey for many but I got a lot from it. The premise: healing your body by processing emotions you’ve buried and trapped for years. This, along with Breaking Free and Counterfeit Comforts, have been such a blessing to me in my healing journey this year.

Lead us to Freedom, Harriet Tubman… I have probably 5-10 of the books in this series, all snagged for free from various library events or free book boxes in our last town. I can’t remember what the first one was that I read but I know I didn’t care for it and promptly traded it in at the used bookstore. This one was fine, but just fine. I really love Harriet Tubman’s amazing faith story and that was totally missing from this one. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with it, but because I know of the much deeper version of the story this one just felt like a hollow shell, even for third graders.

Happy Birthday, Addy!... The fourth in the American Girl Addy series… I liked this one very well too and am again very glad I have this series for my girls to read in a few years!

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone… I reread this one to see how I really feel, now that I’m a mom, about my kids reading it someday. I’m still trying to decide, but mostly, I think I lean towards wanting to read it aloud to them when I think they’re all old enough and having lots of discussion about it all. But we’ll see. But any ways… JK Rowling is a master storyteller, no? I’ve read it before and I’ve seen the movies but still I was completely entranced every night, plowing through it to get to the next part I knew was coming. If anything, having so much knowledge of what was coming next only spurred me on.

Imagination Station 2: Attack at the Arena… I liked this one just fine. I don’t love that it talks so much about people being killed for sport but I had to take a step back and accept that this IS a part of history and that they can’t be sheltered from these things forever… and if they’re going to be introduced to it, I suppose this is a good, gentle way to do it. I have liked all of the books I’ve read in this series so far and I’m going to keep reading through them.

I Survived: The Joplin Tornado… Another in this series that I thought was pretty well-done. I really like Lauren Tarshis’ way of touching on a big, scary event younger people are sometimes really interested in (I was obsessed with depressing material as a kid) but in a way that brings light and hope to the story’s end.

Pirate’s Promise… This was our latest read-aloud, found on the Good and the Beautiful Book List. A loved the last Clyde Robert Bulla book we read (The Sword in the Tree) and says CRB is his favorite author. His only complaint with this book was that it was too short =] I thought it was fine but it wasn’t anything spectacular in my humble opinion.


*I received a free copy of Afraid of all the Things from B&H publishing in exchange for a completely honest review.

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