Archive | February 2024

Down By The River by Lin Stepp

Feb6

Heartwarming

Down By The River by Lin Stepp is the most charming contemporary Christian novel that I absolutely loved. It is part of A Smoky Mountain series but can be read as a stand-alone.

I adore all Lin Stepp’s books – my favourites are in this series. The stories are always delightful. They truly are a hug in a book as they wrap around my heart like a warm blanket.

Right from the start the reader receives a huge welcome. The story is very community-minded as the residents all look out for each other. The town has an air of love and care. It feels like home. “Home is always a place you can come back to.”

No matter what your age, you are never too old to have a new start – whether it is a physical one or a spiritual one. God longs to welcome us all home to Him.

A character has a fresh beginning, after being widowed in recent years. “Begin to live your own dreams.” All her life, her dreams have been squashed in favour of others. Her talents have been ridiculed as position, wealth and power have been the order of the day. Lives were all about show and polish. The outward appearance was all that mattered. People were judged by what they had. “You worked hard to fulfill those expectations… but you lost a little of yourself along the way. You were so busy being what you should be that you forgot a little of who you really were.” A character lost herself over the years. Now is the time to discover just who she was created to be.

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I Have To Save Them by Ellie Midwood

Feb2

The Angel Of Auschwitz

I Have To Save Them by Ellie Midwood is the most powerful, heartbreaking and horrifying dual timeline novel that I just could not put down.

The story starts and ends with the same day in 1961. It bookends the tale. There is a choice to be made – what would you choose?

Much of the novel is set in Auschwitz and is grounded in fact as we follow German citizen, Orli, who was betrayed by her Nazi husband six years earlier. We also ‘hear’ events from 1961 as we see “She may have left Auschwitz’s walls, but the walls of Auschwitz have never left her … tormenting her with nightmares of the past.” As a medic who was under Josef Mengele in Auschwitz, Orli saw terrible things, things that would haunt her forever. It took real strength of character not to crumble as she clung “to her humanity in the face of such brutality.”

Within the infirmary in Auschwitz there grew up a friendship between the nurses. They had to be strong in order to support each other. They offered kindnesses where they could. It felt like a drop in the ocean but “whoever saves a single life saves an entire universe.” The women stood together through it all. “Together we’ll pull through.”

There were times when they felt evil was too much to bear but “they were warriors, each one of them a beacon of resilience, a beacon of hope.” They had to hold on to the hope that one day the sun would shine again. “She knew that even in the darkest times, there was always a glimmer of light, a way to hold onto humanity.” The light shines in the darkness as the angel of Auschwitz walked among them.

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