Next: For The Tough Times

On to the next book! For The Tough Times by Max Lucado. I love this author, have many books by him and I am really looking forward to this book's arrival!!!

Here is what Thomas Nelson has to say about it:

When we feel that life is out of control, He is in control.
When tragedy strikes, people desperately search for answers. Believers and unbelievers alike find themselves turning to God. Best-selling author and pastor Max Lucado points to the only real answer to tragedy and crisis: Prayer. In For the Tough Times, Lucado helps us understand how to pray despite our doubt and fear.

Needs a warning....

Well, I have finally finished reading House of Dark Shadows by Robert Liparulo. Once I got started it went very quickly and held my attantion fully. My first reaction to this book was that it needed a rating of PG-13. There are some highly emotional parts to this book as well as some very graphicly violent passages as well. It was a riveting introduction to what is sure to be a popular series and had a fittingly surprising twist at the end that assures you of the eanrwed aticiaption of future sequels.

In this book, a 15 year old boy and his family move to a backwoods hick town for apparently no reason and the house they find that seems to meet their needs has some disconcerting anomalies about it. Voices seem to come from the wrong direction, paople seem to be in the wrong places and a pair of huge footprints is found in the dust that cannot be explained. When the brothers in the story find that a linen closet mysteriously transports them to a locker at the local school the terror begins and everything unravels.

Mr. Liparulo tells the story masterfully and I was drawn into the story by his picutresquely descriptive writing. If you like mysteries and don't mind a bit of suspense and gore this may be the series for you.

And next on the list...

House of Dark Shadows by Robert Liparulo

Looks like a young adult fiction book, but there was little to chose from this time around and my friend, Mara, is expecting the other one I wanted to read on the list, so it's all good! Look for a review of this one in the next couple of weeks!

Review: The Moon Shines Down

Can I just say, when you read this book it may just take you back to your childhood... or maybe to the childhood of your parents? I know that this book was written by a woman who died in 1952 ( it was recently discovered in an old trunk and published for the first time), but it took me by surprise just how nostalgic it would make me for my childhood and hearing my mother's voice read stories to me as a child. My first read-through of it was to my 6 year old son who loved it and begged to have it read again. The simple song/rhyme "I see the moon" is one that I have sung to my children since infancy and so the book's arrival was eagerly anticipated by us all.



The book takes you on a 'round the globe journey to see many of the cultures of the world and be reminded that the moon shines down on each. The story is reminiscent of Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon in it's tenderness and lullaby-like cadence and it is easy to see how this book will become another classic to the adoring audiences of each of those books as well. I was delighted at the extended length of the book and that it really did touch on so many other cultures without being too deep for young ears.



I recommend this book to any young family who would like to introduce a broader perspective to their children and perhaps reach back to a simpler time when it was easier to see the world as a series of childlike cultural icons on a waffle house map. The innocence and gentleness of this book will be a reassurance to those tired of viewing the world in a defensive manner and who posses a yearning to see all God's children in a common light.