Book Reviews: Secrets and Beneath a Southern Sky

Secrets
by Robin Jones Gunn

I love small towns, so it's no surprise that the Glennbrooke series by Robin Jones Gunn hold a lot of enjoyment for me.  As a highschool reader of the Christy Miller Series, I loved seeing how the lives of characters from those books intertwined with ladies from the Glennbrooke series.

Secrets was a reread for me, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.  In it, 25 year old Jessica has moved to a small town in Oregon in order to escape her overbearing, filthy rich father.  Her journey includes (but is not limited to) a car accident, finding Jesus in Mexico and Dove Bars.  Brilliant writing? No.  Stories about people from a charming town in Oregon falling in love and sharing life together? Yes.  And maybe that's why I like stories like this one so much--they're not brilliant, life changing literature, but they are stories of God moving in people's lives and seeing them live life together.

Beneath  a Southern Sky
by Deborah Raney
Beneath a Southern Sky had a very intriguing (though maybe not all that original) plot--young missionaries in South America, husband dies, wife discovers she's pregnant.  Moves back to US, has baby, falls in love, remarries, gets pregnant and then discovers her first husband is still alive.  As the story alluded to, this was a situation more than one couple found themselves in after World War II, and after other tragedies, no doubt.  However, I felt the solution to the "problem" in this book was a slight cop-out, as not every situation like that is resolved with someone being so self-sacrificing.

(These books were provided for review by WaterbrookMultnomah)