"Deep in the Heart" by Gilbert Morris

I picked up this book and its two sequels on a whim at a used bookstore a couple months ago.  I can remember my mom reading Gilbert Morris books when I was a teen, but I hadn't read him before.  

On a whole, I liked this first book in the Lone Star Legacy trilogy pretty well. I loved Clay and I liked Jerusalem Ann.  I liked most of the characters, actually.  And the history of Texas always fascinates me.  Though that ended up getting in my way a bit here.

Morris sets this during the time leading up to the Texas Revolution in the 1830s, and he has a whole lot of scenes where real-life people like Colonel Travis and Jim Bowie discuss why they are trying to separate Texas from Mexico.  Scenes that really have nothing to do with the book's characters.  They're just there to explain things.  It wasn't necessarily a bad way to explain Texan history... but it also made the actual story come to a screeching halt every now and then, especially in the last third of the book.  And, you know... if I, who love Old West history, got increasingly annoyed by having history lessons inserted that way, I am betting most readers were downright vexed.  

I can see what Morris was trying to do, but it would have been way more effective and enjoyable to have the book's main characters themselves discuss these things!

So, that left me feeling like this is a four-star read.  I'll try the next book, which I suspect won't have that issue so much because the Texas Revolution should be over pretty early in the book.  We'll see.

Particularly Good Bits:

"I wish things would go wrong one at a time, but they never do" (p. 214).

"I found out one thing after all these years.  And that's never to run away from problems.  As sure as you do, a worse one will meet you" (p. 350).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for allusions to men consorting with prostitutes, drunkenness, a family with illegitimate children, women worrying about being captured by Native Americans and assaulted, and scenes of frontier violence.

"The Summer of Yes" by Courtney Walsh

While I wouldn't really call this "Christian Fiction" (though it is marketed as such), it's certainly clean and uplifting.  Characters do vaguely mention the Bible and praying a couple of times.  But for it to be Christian Fiction, I would want to see a lot more active faith on the part of the characters, and that should somehow be involved in their character arcs.

However, it's a really fun book the way it is. Kelsey is a wannabe book editor working as an assistant at a big NYC publisher, and getting hit by a car one morning completely changes her life.  Not because she is injured -- she's basically fine -- but because she briefly shares a hospital room with Georgina, a middle-aged Girl Boss who just wants to be left alone to die of kidney failure in peace.  But Kelsey is bad at accepting "no" for an answer, and a buddy comedy ensues.  The kind where the main characters don't like each other very well (think Lethal Weapon, with Danny Glover as Georgina and Mel Gibson as Kelsey) but end up bonding over a lot of mishaps that the audience finds very funny.  

Also, there's a romance, because Georgina's estranged son is hot, and Kelsey is cute, and this is a cute summer book.  But the main focus is the reluctant friendship between Kelsey and Georgina. 

I didn't love this book, but I enjoyed it a lot and will be hanging onto my copy.

Particularly Good Bits:

My life rolls out in front of me like an art film that nobody understands (p. 14).

Independent doesn't have to mean alone, right? (p. 34).

She's practically bouncing up and down, wearing her excitement like a fancy new party dress (p. 85).

But then it occurs to me that where one lives so often determines how one lives (p. 157).

"If you learn nothing else from my life, learn this.  Don't wait to love the people you love" (p. 363).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for discussions of dying, kidney dialysis, the car accident and resulting injuries, etc.  No cussing or smut or violence.

"Follow the Lonesome Trail" Releases Today!

It's here!  The wild west anthology Follow the Lonesome Trail releases today!

This brand-new collection boasts stories by Allison Tebo, Hannah Kaye, A. Hartley, Emily Hayse, Elisabeth Grace Foley, and Rachel Kovaciny (aka me).  

My short story in this book is called "Safekeeping," and it's a story of second chances and hope.  A loner learns that he's inherited a poke of gold, but it's in the clutches of a greedy bartender, and he has to come up with a creative solution to get what's rightfully his.  Along the way, he helps out a whole lot of other people and just might find himself a place to belong.

Here's what one reader had to say about it:

You can buy Follow the Lonesome Trail as a paperback and ebook today!  And you can check out more reviews (and review it yourself once you've read it) right here on Goodreads.

If you're on Instagram, I invite you to join me there at 1pm (CST) for a live video chat where I will read the first scene from "Safekeeping" aloud to you -- and I might have time to answer a few questions, too.

If you want to know more about the other books I've written, you can check out this page on this blog or my author website.

Happy reading!

"Chase the Legend" by Hannah Kaye

Chase the Legend by Hannah Kaye is a fantasy retelling of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.  It's about a young woman signs on with a crew hunting a legendary dragon.  She makes new friends, faces new and old fears, and finally comes to terms with the fact that she's been fleeing her future as much as her past.  

It's a good shipboard adventure story, and the characters are unique and entertaining... but I never quite connected to any of them.  That might be just a me thing, as I have come to realize that I often just don't like extremely obsessive characters, and everyone in this book has some kind of obsession, obvious or not,  damaging or not.

Particularly Good Bits:

The lights of Edgewater floated in the fog like lost ghosts, wandering the night with no hope of shelter (p. 35).

"But you can't love someone hard enough to convince them they're worthy of love, not if they refuse to believe it themselves" (p. 152).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for scenes of peril and some scary moments.

"The Code of the Woosters" by P. G. Wodehouse

My teens and I listened to The Code of the Woosters while on a family road trip this summer, and howled our way through the whole thing. Jonathan Cecil is an absolute delight when it comes to reading the Jeeves and Wooster books.

If you are curious, this is the book involving an antique cow creamer.  Someone buys it.  Someone else wants it.  Bertie agrees to steal it.  Bertie decides not to steal it.  Various friends of Bertie's get engaged, break of engagements, attempt to steal the cow creamer... it's extremely convoluted.  And hilarious.  But not in a way I can explain.  Wodehouse really is one of those authors that you just have to read yourself -- and if you find him funny, you find him very funny, but if you don't... you probably think people who are laughing over the antics and hijinks in his books are very odd.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for a sprinkling of old-fashioned cuss words here and there.

This is my 42nd book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list.

"Midsummer Mysteries" by Agatha Christie

I did it!  I read all four of these season-themed Christie collections in four consecutive seasons!

It's the little things in life, amiright?

The short stories in this volume include stories about Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Mr. Quin, Tommy and Tuppence, and Mr. Parker Pyne.  Plus a story or two with none of them.  I've grown so fond of Pyne and Quin that I have actually picked up collections of stories about only them, because I'd like to read more!

I'd say my favorite stories in this are "Jane in Search of a Job" and "The Rajah's Emerald," which happen to be two of the stories with no famous detectives in them.  I also really liked "The Oracle at Delphi" and "The Incredible Theft."

I most definitely did NOT like "The Idol House of Astarte," which was creepy.

I just learned that Harper Collins is doing two more collections similar to this: Capital Christie and Country Christie, and now I want those too.  So far, it seems like you can only buy the former in the UK, and the latter won't be released until September.  I will probably wait until September and then see if I can't order them both from someplace like Waterstones that ships to the US.  Or maybe they'll have them in the US by then too.

Particularly Good Bits:

The book she took with her to read was not the excellent one on Grecian Art recommended to her by her son but was, on the contrary, entitles The River Launch Mystery.  It had four murders in it, three abductions, and a large and varied gang of dangerous criminals  Mrs. Peters found herself both invigorated and soothed by the perusal of it (p. 165, "The Oracle at Delphi")(I love that last line because that's what good mysteries do for me, too.)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for crimes such as murder and abduction and theft, and the sorts of violence you might expect Agatha Christie to write about.  No rubbing gore in the reader's face, in other words.  There are a handful of mild curse words, and some very polite dialog mentions about people having romantic affairs, etc.

This has been my 41st book read and reviewed for my 4th Classics Club list.

"North and South" by Elizabeth Gaskell (again)

Have you ever felt like God nudged you to read a specific book when you needed it, without your realizing He was doing that?

At the beginning of June, my father-in-law was discussing the Industrial Revolution with some of us.  He said something about wanting a good way to get a clear idea of how the implementation of factories affected ordinary people.  I piped up and recommended North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, which is all about the two sides of the factory coin -- it shows the struggles of the factory owners and of the factory workers.  I said it's pretty even-handed, and it's written by someone who lived in a manufacturing-centric city, and it's a really enjoyable read besides.

My father-in-law said maybe he would try it someday, if he lives long enough.  I extolled its virtues some  more.  He was still unenthusiastic.  I doubt he will ever read the book.

But I had reminded myself how very much I like this book.  (After this third reading, I will bump that up a notch and say I love it.)  All this took place while I was hastily packing for a will-we-or-won't-we vacation that we finally decided to take two days before we meant to leave, after having to toss all our original travel plans out the door and make new ones almost on the spot.  The night before we left, I pulled out of my bag three books I'd meant to take along and put in a copy of North and South instead.

It's the only book I read over the two weeks of our vacation (not counting an audiobook we all listened to as a family).  And it was exactly what I needed.

The reason we had to rearrange our travel plans was that my mom had gotten a preliminary diagnosis of lung cancer, pending more tests.  Instead of spending two weeks of June at her house in Iowa with us, she had to stay here in Virginia with my brother's family and have a biopsy and other tests done.  So we rejiggered all our plans and set off for a vastly different vacation than we had been looking forward to, all while having this possibility of Mom having cancer hanging over our heads.  

And what is this book about?  Why, a daughter whose mother slowly succumbs to a lingering illness, and who loses her father without warning.  I lost my dad without warning last fall, and here I am, facing my mother's lingering illness.  While we were gone, my mom did receive a diagnosis: stage 4 lung cancer.  And Margaret Hale was right there beside me, bearing up under personal pain and loss and fear and worry and uncertainty, just like me.

I'm fully convinced the Holy Spirit sometimes nudges my hand to pick up specific books.  Like when I read Summon the Light by Tor Thibeaux on the way to my dad's funeral.  Like when I ditched other books and stuck this in my bag at nearly the last minute.  Fiction has such power, and our Creator knows it.  Why else would He have taught using fictional stories so often?

Particularly Good Bits:

"I must do something.  I must make myself busy, to keep off morbid thoughts" (p. 35).

"I came here very sad, and rather too apt to think my own cause for grief was the only one in the world.  And now I hear how you have had to bear for years, and that makes me stronger" (p. 129-130).

"My theory is a sort of parody on the maxim of 'Get money, my son, honestly if you can, but get money.'  My precept is, 'Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something'" (p. 231).

"Come! poor little heart! be cheery and brave" (p. 304).

"It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young; afterwards, we lose the sense of the mysterious.  I take changes in all I see as a matter of course.  The instability of all human things is familiar to me; to you it is new and oppressive" (p. 359).

(I find it very interesting and appropriate that all my favorite lines this time are very different from my favorite lines the first time I read this.)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for some violence and quite a lot of character deaths, really.