Love Does

 By Bob Goff

Thomas Nelson     2012

224 pages     Spiritual

Bob Goff’s first book, Love Does, is a book of experiential stories from the author’s life and the spiritual lessons that he learned from those experiences. Here is a quick summary of the book.

“As a college student he spent 16 days in the Pacific Ocean with five guys and a crate of canned meat. As a father he took his kids on a world tour to eat ice cream with heads of state. He made friends in Uganda, and they liked him so much he became the Ugandan consul. He pursued his wife for three years before she agreed to date him. His grades weren't good enough to get into law school, so he sat on a bench outside the Dean's office for seven days until they finally let him enroll.
Bob Goff has become something of a legend, and his friends consider him the world's best-kept secret. Those same friends have long insisted he write a book. What follows are paradigm shifts, musings, and stories from one of the world's most delightfully engaging and winsome people. What fuels his impact? Love. But it's not the kind of love that stops at thoughts and feelings. Bob's love takes action. Bob believes Love Does.
When Love Does, life gets interesting. Each day turns into a hilarious, whimsical, meaningful chance that makes faith simple and real. Each chapter is a story that forms a book, a life. And this is one life you don't want to miss. Light and fun, unique and profound, the lessons drawn from Bob's life and attitude just might inspire you to be secretly incredible, too.”

Having had no knowledge of or experience with Bob Goff, I approached Love Does with curiosity. I had not been at the last church book group when the book was chosen, and I wondered what the attraction was. I soon found out. Each chapter begins with a story from his life, and ends with that story’s relationship to Jesus and the Christian life. Each chapter becomes a life lesson. I related to many of the stories in the book, and I found many of them to be quite meaningful. I read the book day by day, chapter by chapter. Each chapter gives the reader food for thought in a very delightful manner, and I found the chapters comforting when read for my own well-being at the end of the day.  

Bob Goff is an extraordinary person, a lawyer and author, dedicated to helping children who have been sold into slavery, particularly in Ghana. The profits from this book, and perhaps others of his book series, support his ministry around the world. I just discovered that Bob Goff will be in Grand Rapids and Holland Michigan in March. Isn’t it funny how something or someone you knew nothing about somehow becomes ever-present in your life.

Here is Bob Goff’s website. On his website, you can get access to his weekly podcasts. He’s quite a guy.

Verity

 By Colleen Hoover

Grand Central     2021

336  pages     Thriller

Well, now I have read a Colleen Hoover book after seeing her name on the NY Times bestseller list in four slots in one week. What kind of magic is she spinning? My friend and I decided to try out one of her books to see for ourselves what was going on. So, we chose Verity. Was this choice a big mistake, or are all of her books this outrageous? Don’t know because this is the only one I have read and probably the only one I will read.

Here is a synopsis of the plot as written by a Goodreads reviewer: "Lowen Ashleigh is set free from the long tedium of her daily life when she’s employed by Jeremy Crawford to ghostwrite the remaining books in a popular series his wife, Verity, is unable to finish due to an unfortunate accident. Lowe acquiesces in the spirit of hope: that this opportunity would help her acquire some small measure of celebrity and that celebrity would be oxygen to the fire of her career. But nothing prepares Lowen for Verity’s autobiography, which she accidentally stumbles upon one day. For the horror of it. Verity’s secrets paint a different picture of what Lowen thought she knew of Verity, Jeremy, and their lives together. But sooner or later, as these things often go, the whole truth will spill, and the fraught waiting in-between would come to an end, with havoc and screaming and loss."

Yeah, so…. I didn’t like the character of Lowen very much. I felt that her thoughts were poorly developed. She spent more time lusting after Jeremy than she did developing the books that she was hired to do. Should she tell Jeremy how evil Verity was—or was Jeremy just as evil? The chapters she read of Verity’s autobiography are just as confusing as are the actions of the supposedly comatose woman in the bed upstairs. But I kept reading!

Verity’s autobiography discovered by Lowen is horrifying. She spends more time writing about the sex she has with Jeremy than she does on the death of her daughters. I hated Verity for that. But I kept reading!

The plot is sickening, primarily because it deals with the deaths of twin sisters, one perhaps killing the other as very young girls.  Did this really happen?  But I kept reading. And why does Lowen see Verity sneaking around the house and nobody else does—including her nurse and her husband? But I kept reading until I got to the mind-bending ending.

Then once I finished the book, I discovered that Hoover had written an epilogue of sorts in the days following the publishing of Verity, which caused book lovers to have to buy another copy to read the additional chapter. Very smooth marketing move! So everyone kept reading!

I’m not sure that I will read another Colleen Hoover book. I told the friend who was reading with me that this book was f….. up, and she responded that it was ridiculous, obnoxious, and far-fetched. So why did I keep reading? It may be that this is the attraction with Colleen Hoover books—we just keep reading!

If you are trying to decide if you want to read Verity, look at the reviews in Goodreads. They are all over the place, and there are thousands of them. Wow! And therein is why she is on the bestseller list. Everyone just keeps reading!

Murder Book

 By Thomas Perry

Mysterious Press             2023

399 pages     Thriller

When I began Murder Book, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. I knew Thomas Perry by name and reputation, but I didn’t know how propulsive his novels were. Once I got started, I couldn’t stop. That’s saying a lot about the book right there!

Harry Duncan is a Chicago-based private eye having had a long career as a police detective. His ex-wife and U.S. Attorney, Ellen Leicester, called to ask him to look into some crimes being committed in an area of small towns in Indiana. She is worried that these crimes are an aspect of a much larger organized crime  operation. Why in small town Indiana? It seems an anomaly until Harry puts an end to the work of low-life bad guys who are extorting protection money from property owners in Parkman’s Elbow, Indiana. He then realizes that the crimes he has canceled are just the beginning. His search for villains takes him back to Chicago and then back to the Ash River in Indiana, where the solution to the crimes presents itself.

 The title, Murder Book, comes from the diaries that Harry keeps for every crime that he works on and solves. He writes down each day’s activities and the ideas he has for what he should explore the next day. We are privy to his thoughts, but more specifically, the reader sees the entire crime through Harry’s eyes and his actions. In other words, the focus of Murder Book is entirely on Harry. There are several other interesting characters, including the US Attorney, Ellen, but all of the action revolves around Harry. This creates a propulsive rush all the way through the book that keeps the reader turning pages.

The solution as to why the Ash River area in Indiana is the scene of the crime comes from an unlikely source—sandhill cranes. When I looked up “sandhill cranes in Indiana,” I found that they come to an area called the Jasper-Pulaski Fish and Wildlife Area, which is near the small town of Medaryville, Indiana. I am sure that this is the area Thomas Perry had in mind as he was writing the book. Some scenes take place in Chicago, which is about 90 minutes away from Medaryville. I looked all this up because I thought that the only Midwest place sandhill cranes spent time was at the Bernard Baker Sanctuary north of Marshall, Michigan. ( I have actually visited that sanctuary and watched the sandhill cranes.) I agree, it’s kind of funky, but it is a very clever plot device and totally unexpected.

I had to laugh at myself as I was reading Murder Book. I went for a hike in a woodland area and plotted how I would sneak through the area without anyone seeing me. Harry Duncan does that a lot—parks totally out of site, creeps around the grounds, and “cases the joint” without anyone knowing he is there. I found myself being Harry.

Last night I began watching The Old Man on Amazon Prime. This is a TV series based on a novel by Thomas Perry. I could see that much of what moved The Old Man along is what I was admiring in Murder Book. The Wall Street Journal says that Perry writes thrillers that move “almost faster than a speeding bullet.” Real Book Spy review says that this thriller “proves yet again that he remains one of the strongest writers in the genre today.”

If you love private eye mysteries, you will learn a lot from reading Murder Book. I heartily recommend it.

 

The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennett

By Katherine Cowley

Tule Publishing     2021

342 pages     Historical Fiction

Mary Bennett is the third girl of five in Jane Austen’s Bennet family. She is often passed over, ignored, or told to stop playing the pianoforte. Katherine Cowley has chosen to develop the character of Mary in her series of historical spy novels based on Jane Austen's characters. When The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet begins, Mr. Bennet has just died and the family is in chaos. They are trying to get ready for the funeral with funeral clothing and gloves and all the other protocol of an early 1800s funeral. A cousin, Mr. Collins, has arrived to take possession of the house; Mrs. Bennet is frantic; and Mary is quickly realizing that she has few options. She cannot stay unmarried in the home of her childhood.

An unknown relative, Lady Trafford, arrives and makes Mary an offer that she can’t refuse—move with her to Castle Durrington and obtain an education to be a governess. Mary feels she has no choice, and soon leaves with Lady Trafford and her nephew, Henry Withrow, to move into Castle Durrington, far away from her mother and sisters.

When she begins her education at the castle, Mary soon realizes that something is going on involving Lady Trafford and Mr. Withrow in what appears to be illegal activity—or is it spying--because England is beginning to fear an invasion from Napoleon Bonaparte, and Castle Durrington is right on the coastline. Mary sets out to discover what she can about these goings-on, all the while maintaining the pretense of learning drawing, French, economics, and history from her hosts.

As the book summary says, “Never underestimate the observation skills of a woman who hides in the background.”

A huge disclaimer as I continue this review. For reasons that I can’t explain, I had never read any Jane Austen books nor seen a single movie adaptation before I began Katherine Cowley’s inventive “next chapter.” All of the Bennet girls were strangers to me, and I had no grasp of Austen’s style of writing. So I struggled. I struggled as the difficult roles of women were discussed in great detail. I struggled through the way the women were discouraged from appropriately grieving their father’s death. I struggled through a several page discussion of how to fold paper so a letter could get mailed, protected from prying eyes. All of these details are extensively explored within the narrative.

I celebrate the vast amount of research that Cowley had to have done to include the details that I kept underlining, including, for instance, the name of a famous pastor of the day and his sermons and the way that women had to ride sidesaddle.  The beginning of each chapter quotes some of the research the author has done to aid in the understanding of what is going to happen in the upcoming chapter. The quotes alone are quite impressive.

Once the mystery of what was going on at the castle began to develop, I got caught up in the story line and became more impressed with Mary, her inquisitiveness, her courage, and her ability to step out of the bonds of convention in order to solve the mystery.

After I finished the book, I watched the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice and immediately noticed that the character of Mary is scarcely approached in the narrative. No wonder Cowley chose her to develop more fully.

What I didn’t mention previously in this review is that Katherine Cowley teaches writing at Western Michigan University and lives in our community. She will be at our book club next week, and I will have lots of questions to ask her. She also has two additional books in this series: The True Confessions of a London Spy, and The Lady’s Guide to Death and Deception.  I have both of them and plan to continue my adventures with Mary Bennet.

Katherine Cowley’s website. One of the interesting parts of her website is a series of blog posts about creative writing principles. She has won awards for her lessons. Check it out.