Girl meets boy. Boy becomes obsessed with girl. Girl returns the favor. Boy turns out to be a vampire. Girl doesn’t mind as long as she can be with boy every moment of her life. This is a stereotypical, adolescent relationship (with the exception of the Dracula factor)! In Stephanie Meyer’s fast-paced Twilight series, obsessive love is the name of the game. The main character, Isabella “Bella” Swan, has never dated before she encounters the perfect-in-every-way Edward Cullen. What ensues is a highly charged romance that is sure to suck in every female heart longing for a little excitement and (apparently) clean fantasy. This review primarily considers the novels since they tell the story in far greater detail than the movie.
I first got interested in this series when one of my wife’s coworkers sent the books home for our teen girls to read. My wife is not naïve and asked me to read the books to evaluate them. When I told people that I was reading the series, I was amazed at the response. More than a few Christian women and teen girls had been following the series since the first volume, and many had read them multiple times. A friend told me that at her strict fundamental church, the series was all the rage among the girls in the youth group. Over the past few months, I have come to the conclusion that Twilight is only slightly less a craze among Christians than it is among unbelievers.read more
Davis Bunn and Janette Oke, The Centurion’s Wife (Acts of Faith, Book 1) (Minneapolis, MN:Bethany House, 2009), 384 pages, softcover
About the Book (promotional text)
Janette Oke has dreamed for years of retelling a story in a biblical time frame from a female protagonist’s perspective, and Davis Bunn is elated to be working with her again on this sweeping saga of the dramatic events surrounding the birth of Christianity … and the very personal story of Leah, a young Jewess of mixed heritage trapped in a vortex of competing political agendas and private trauma.
Caught up in the maelstrom following the death of an obscure rabbi in the Roman backwater of first-century Palestine, Leah finds herself also engulfed in her own turmoil—facing the prospect of an arranged marriage to a Roman soldier, Alban, who seems to care for nothing but his own ambitions.
Head of the garrison near Galilee, he has been assigned by Palestine’s governor to ferret out the truth behind rumors of a political execution gone awry. Leah’s mistress, the governor’s wife, secretly commissions Leah also to discover what really has become of this man whose death—and missing body—is causing such furor. read more
Editor’s Note: This article was reprinted with permission from Dan Miller’s book Spiritual Reflections.
“Who said anything about safe?” Have you ever been reading and had a line jump off the page, grab you by the nose hairs, and refuse to let go until your body fairly tingles and your eyes nearly water with its meaning? That was my experience when I first read Mr. Beaver’s classic retort to Susan in C. S. Lewis’s fictional series The Chronicles of Narnia (Book 2: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, p. 86).
In this classic tale—verbally shallow enough for children to wade in, philosophically deep enough for adults to drown in—Lewis creates the make-believe world of Narnia. In this mythical land, people and animals converse with one another, and Lewis chooses to cast a great lion named Aslan as the Christ-figure.
A group of English children find themselves in Narnia, seated at a kitchen table, talking with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. Word has it that Aslan has recently arrived on a rare visit to Narnia and that arrangements have been made for the children to meet the “Lord of all the wood” (Mr. Beaver’s description). Young Susan, in particular, is hesitant about meeting a lion. She queries:
“Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
The Christmas season is upon us, and some of you may still be finishing up your shopping for gifts. Others of us are hoping that there will be some “book money” in the stocking. By the way, gift certificates are usually the safest way to go when a book lover is on your list and you have no idea which book to select. (They’re also very easy to wrap!) Our favorite bookstores offer gift certificates that can be purchased online. They are as follows:
Christian Book Distributors—Gift certificates for any dollar amount can be purchased online and sent by e-mail or standard mail. These gift certificates are redeemable toward any product sold by Christianbook.com.
Amazon—Gift cards can be purchased online and sent by e-mail, by standard mail, or by printing and giving in person. Cards are redeemable for millions of items, ship for free, never expire, and are available in any amount from $5 to $5,000.
Westminster Bookstore—Gift certificates are available in any amount. Certificates purchased online are e-mailed to the recipient. These gift certificates can be redeemed online or in our retail store. Note: Gift certificates are nonrefundable and may not be exchanged for cash or credit.
Note: This review has been reprinted with permission from the author. For a printer-friendly PDF version of this review, click here.
The Shack is the unlikeliest of success stories. The first and only book written by a salesman from Oregon, it was never supposed to be published. William P. Young wrote the tale for the benefit of his children and after its completion in 2005, it was copied and bound at Kinko’s in time for him to give it to his children for Christmas.
Shortly after he completed the book, Young showed the manuscript to Wayne Jacobsen, a former pastor who had begun a small publishing company. After the manuscript was rejected by other publishers, Jacobsen and his co-publisher Brad Cummings decided to publish it themselves under the banner of Windblown Media.
The three men, with only a $300 marketing budget at their disposal, began a word-of-mouth campaign to let people know about the book. The rest, as they say, is history. read more
Subjects: Christian Fiction, Suspense/Mystery Chapter Excerpt
Ted Dekker is known for novels that combine adrenaline-laced stories with unexpected plot twists, unforgettable characters, and incredible confrontations between good and evil. Ted lives in Austin with his wife LeeAnn and their four children.
The Gist
Marsuvees Black, a self-proclaimed preacher, strides into Paradise, a small town in Colorado, claiming that God sent him to bring “grace and hope.” Black looks more like a stereotypical gunslinger and behaves more like a magician. After calling a town meeting to proclaim his message, he pulls an apple out of the air. A moment later, he turns it into a snake. Then, while everyone watches, he makes a man’s wart disappear. read more
Girl meets boy. Boy becomes obsessed with girl. Girl returns the favor. Boy turns out to be a vampire. Girl doesn’t mind as long as she can be with boy every moment of her life. This is a stereotypical, adolescent relationship (with the exception of the Dracula factor)! In Stephanie Meyer’s fast-paced Twilight series, obsessive love is the name of the game. The main character, Isabella “Bella” Swan, has never dated before she encounters the perfect-in-every-way Edward Cullen. What ensues is a highly charged romance that is sure to suck in every female heart longing for a little excitement and (apparently) clean fantasy. This review primarily considers the novels since they tell the story in far greater detail than the movie.
Janette Oke has dreamed for years of retelling a story in a biblical time frame from a female protagonist’s perspective, and Davis Bunn is elated to be working with her again on this sweeping saga of the dramatic events surrounding the birth of Christianity … and the very personal story of Leah, a young Jewess of mixed heritage trapped in a vortex of competing political agendas and private trauma.
Have you ever been reading and had a line jump off the page, grab you by the nose hairs, and refuse to let go until your body fairly tingles and your eyes nearly water with its meaning? That was my experience when I first read Mr. Beaver’s classic retort to Susan in C. S. Lewis’s fictional series The Chronicles of Narnia (Book 2: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, p. 86).
Thrasher, Travis. Isolation. New York: Faith Words, 2008. Trade Paperback, 304 pages. $13.99.
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Purchase: 
