April's Picks
April's Reading Style:
I read for pleasure, for knowledge and for children's reader's advisory. Non-fiction books usually include titles that give me tangible, practical ways to strengthen my Christian faith. Fiction and juvenile titles are often ones I find after browsing www.goodreads.com or www.readbrightly.com.
The edge of anything
Carpenter, Nora, author
2020
"Len is a loner teen photographer haunted by a past that's stagnated her work and left her terrified she's losing her mind. Sage is a high school volleyball star desperate to find a way around her sudden medical disqualification. Both girls need college scholarships. After a chance encounter, the two develop an unlikely friendship that enables them to begin facing their inner demons. But both Len and Sage are keeping secrets that, left hidden, could cost them everything, maybe even their lives."-- Provided by publisher.
Get out of your head : stop the spiral of toxic thoughts
Allen, Jennie, author
2020
Speaker and Bible teacher Jennie Allen hears all the time from women who feel stuck in patterns of frustration and defeat. In her search for a solution, she's learned that the greatest spiritual battle of our generation is taking place between our ears. How we think shapes how we live. So it's crucial that we learn how to stop our spinning thoughts and refuse to be victims of toxic thinking patterns like victimhood, anxiety, and distraction. In this book Jennie draws on biblical truth and recent discoveries in neuroscience to show exactly how we can fight the enemies of the mind with the truth of who God is and who He calls us to be.
The glass hotel
Mandel, Emily St. John, 1979- author
2020
A weaving of three lives that captivates money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise. Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette. New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it's the beginning of their life together. Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees a note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later, Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship.
If I knew then : finding wisdom in failure and power in aging
Arden, Jann, author
2020
Digging deep into her strengths, her failures and her losses, Jann Arden brings us an inspiring account of how she has surprised herself, in her fifties, by at last becoming completely her own person. Like many women, it took Jann a long time to realize that trying to be pleasing and likeable and beautiful in the eyes of others was a loser's game. Letting it rip, and damning the consequences, is not only liberating, it's a hell of a lot of fun: "Being the age I am--that so many women are--is just the best time of my life." Jann weaves her own story together with tales of her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, and the father she came close to hating, to show her younger self--and all of us--that fear and avoidance is no way to live.
Praying women : how to pray when you don't know what to say
Walsh, Sheila, 1956- author
2020
"Bestselling author and speaker invites women to experience the incredible power of prayer through ongoing conversation with God, inspiring them to develop a lifestyle of prayer that will change their hearts-and the world"-- Provided by publisher.