This morning, I have been reflecting on the season change and the warmer weather we have been experiencing in the South and I’m looking forward to what summer will bring. This weekend, I plan on reading and studying with a renewed sense of gratefulness for God’s Word and the access to seminary books from my father’s theological library that I would otherwise not be able to afford.

This weekend, I’m also reading two fiction books and one of them I had started a couple weeks ago-I think-and had to put aside temporary to finish up two others for a review deadline. The days were getting away from me. I feel like that tends to happen when you are engrossed in books, and you will not get any complaints on that score from me.

I’m also starting an in-depth Bible study in the book of Hebrews this weekend, so I may share what that looks like a little later in the month or next month.

Have a blessed weekend!

Stephanie

The two books are as follow:

You Belong Here Now by Dianna Rostad

Published April 6, 2021 by William Morrow Paperbacks

In this brilliant debut reminiscent of William Kent Krueger’s This Tender Land and Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours, three orphans’ journey westward from New York City to the Big Sky Country of Montana, hoping for a better life where beautiful wild horses roam free.

Montana 1925: Three brave kids from New York board the orphan train headed west. An Irish boy who lost his whole family to Spanish flu, a tiny girl who won’t talk, and a volatile young man who desperately needs to escape Hell’s Kitchen. They are paraded on platforms across the Midwest to work-worn folks and journey countless miles, racing the sun westward. Before they reach the last rejection and stop, the kids come up with a daring plan, and they set off toward the Yellowstone River and grassy mountains where the wild horses roam.

Fate guides them toward the ranch of a family stricken by loss. Broken and unable to outrun their pasts in New York, the family must do the unthinkable in order to save them.

Nara, the daughter of a successful cattleman, has grown into a brusque spinster who refuses the kids on sight. She’s worked hard to gain her father’s respect and hopes to run their operation, but if the kids stay, she’ll be stuck in the kitchen.

Nara works them without mercy, hoping they’ll run off, but they buck up and show spirit, and though Nara will never be motherly, she begins to take to them. So, when Charles is jailed for freeing wild horses that were rounded up for slaughter, and an abusive mother from New York shows up to take the youngest, Nara does the unthinkable, risking everything she holds dear to change their lives forever.

In This Moment by Gabrielle Meyer

Timeless #2

Published May 2, 2023 by Bethany House Publishers

Maggie inherited a gift from her time-crossing parents that allows her to live three separate lives in 1861, 1941, and 2001. Each night she goes to sleep-in one-time period and wakes up in another. Until, that is, she turns twenty-one, when she will have to forfeit two of those lives–and everyone she knows in them–forever.

In 1861, Maggie is the daughter of an influential senator at the outbreak of the Civil War, navigating a capital full of Southern spies and wounded soldiers. In 1941, she is a Navy nurse, grappling with her knowledge of the future when she’s asked to join a hospital ship being sent to Pearl Harbor. And in 2001, she’s a brilliant young medical student, fulfilling her dream of becoming a surgeon, yet unable to use her modern skills in her other paths.

While Maggie has sworn off romance until she makes her final choice, an intriguing man tugs at her heart in each era. The mysterious British gentleman. The prickly, demanding doctor. The charming young congressman. She’s drawn to each man in different ways, only complicating the impossible decision she must make, which looms ever closer.

With so much on the line, how can Maggie choose just one life to keep and the rest to lose?