Beguiled by Deeanne Gist and J. Mark Bertrand

This week, the


Christian Fiction Blog Alliance


is introducing 
Beguiled(Bethany House March 1, 2007) byDeeanne GistandJ. Mark Bertrand
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S):

Deeanne Gist, the bestselling author of A Bride Most Begrudging and The Measure of a Lady, has a background in education and journalism. Her credits include People magazine, Parents, and Parenting. With a line of parenting products called "I Did It!® Productions" and a degree from Texas A&M, she continues her writing and speaking. She and her family live in Houston, Texas.

J. Mark Bertrand has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. After one hurricane too many, he left Houston and relocated with his wife Laurie to the plains of South Dakota.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In the shadows of Charleston, someone is watching her... Rylee Monroe, a dogwalker in Charleston's wealthiest neighborhood, never feared the streets at night. But now a thief is terrorizing the area and worse, someone seems to be targeting her.

Reporter Logan Woods is covering the break-ins with the hope of publishing them as a true-crime book. The more he digs, the more he realizes this beguiling dogwalker seems to be at the center of everything. As danger draws ever closer, Logan must choose: Chase the girl, the story, or plunge into the shadows after the villain who threatens everything?

If you'd like to read the first chapter of Beguiled, go HERE.


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The Judas Ride by Peggy Sue Yarber

This week, the


Christian Fiction Blog Alliance


is introducing


The Judas Ride


Tate Publishing (December 8, 2009)


by


Peggy Sue Yarber


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Peggy Sue Yarber, PhD in psychology, lives in central California with her husband, two daughters, six turtles and two dogs. She works in the field of education.

The Judas Ride was inspired by her current and previous students. She has seen and experienced and seen similarities between the students and Jesus’ traitor, Judas Iscariot. She has always been fascinated with Judas. Yarber went to a catholic school when she was young and Judas was always portrayed like a mysterious rebel.

She ventures to say, “I guess he was my James Dean of the Bible. But in a good way! In the way that…he did something so wrong so that the entire world could be saved. He had to betray Jesus in order for the rest of the story. I have always wondered what it would be like to not do that one bad thing that would lead to that one great thing. So I had the Vader character sort of run through the paces of Judas.”

Redemption and reality are the two distinguishing features about Yarber’s writing. Not all teens find redemption in The Judas Ride. Yarber considered trying to show the negative outcomes as much as the positive. She wasn’t thinking in terms of positive and negative but she did try to balance the two sides. Yarber says she often sees people daily that , “…have even more screwed up lives than these characters.” Yarber admits sometimes there is not an ending to the madness unless someone dies and then even after the death the ripples still linger. She has written another novel TARE and a children’s book Rocketships to Heaven and the SOS Fuel Station. She loves to run, read, shoot guns and watch her daughters play soccer.

ABOUT THE BOOK

An unwed (and unwanted) teen pregnancy with two possible fathers. Abusive relationships. Drug and alcohol addiction. Rape and molestation. The struggle to understand grace, forgiveness, and free will versus predestination. The Judas Ride hits the road running in the opening pages, where Sonia and Xavier argue explosively about whether Sonia should have their unborn child and about who the father is: Xavier, a struggling Christian, or Vader, an abusive and abused drug dealer. As the pages turn, readers continue to meet a hodgepodge of troubled teens and eclectic characters, including Pastor Manny, a quirky immigrant pastor infatuated with John Wayne. Pastor Manny desires to help the tortured souls in his community but finds that it takes more than unconditional love to reach them. Secrets literally kill in The Judas Ride, an edgy, in-your-your face Christian novel that boldly explores the struggles of modern-day young people.

If you would like to read the first chapter of The Judas Ride, go HERE

Back Cover Review:
The Judas Ride is a diamond in the rough. A novel that deals with a variety of serious issues facing teens today, it reads alot like a synopsis - one that if further fleshed out contains the material for five novels. The biggest challenge of this book is that in much of it, the novel "tells" the reader without showing them. Secondly, is the broad spectrum of characters - I was unable to keep track of all of them. I feel that the story would have greater impact if it focused on the turmoil of just one or two of the teens.

Bravo to Peggy Sue for facing some topics head on that many Christians avoid. She is a great writer with alot of potential. I hope that she pursues editing with a passion and continues to develop her God-given talent!

The Last Day by James Landis

This week, the



Christian Fiction Blog Alliance



is introducing



The Last Day



Steerforth; 1st edition (September 1, 2009)



by



James Landis


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


James Landis lives in New Hampshire.


















ABOUT THE BOOK

Warren Harlan Pease, the young narrator of this spellbinding novel, returns to his native New Hampshire from the Iraq War and spends an entire day with Jesus visiting and contemplating his own life with fresh eyes, and a willing heart. He examines his relationships to those he loves─his girlfriend, his best friend, his father, his dead mother, his daughter ─ and grapples with the pain he has been carrying since the death of his mother when he was still a boy.

While in Iraq, armed with his sniper’s rifle and his deeply held faith, Specialist Pease traveled across ideological borders and earned an appreciation for his enemy’s culture and for what connects us all as human beings. He also learned how to kill and taught others to do the same. “War doesn’t test your faith in Jesus,” Warren comes to realize. “It tests your faith in yourself.” The Last Day answers some questions and asks many more. It’s a powerful meditation on religion and war, love and loss.

This work of compassion and healing grace will resonate with skeptics and believers, be shared and discussed between friends and among families. It is a book for our time, and forever.


If you would like to read an excerpt from Chapter one of , go HERE

The One-Day Way by Chantel Hobbs

The One-Day Way produces lasting results by taking you back to basics. No more complicated weight-loss strategies. No more expensive diet plans that achieve only temporary results. Instead, you will lose weight and get fit with Chantel Hobbs’s simple, high-energy meal plans and her at-home program for cardio exercise and strength training. She will teach you how to change the way you think, which leads to new actions. Before you know it you will be strong, fit, and healthy. All it takes is doing things differently for twenty-four hours—and then repeating it.

The One-Day Way gives you everything you need to lose weight and get fit in body, mind, and spirit:

• Break free from past dieting defeats
• Learn a realistic, life-changing way to measure success
• Change the way you think so you can change your life
• Translate your dreams into goals, and your goals into lasting achievements
• Get strong with thirty-one simple exercises, no fancy equipment required
• Take advantage of ten ways to eat better while you lose weight

By focusing on food, faith, and fitness, Chantel shows you not only how to lose weight, but how to build the new life you were designed to live. You don’t have to wait any longer. The One-Day Way gives you all the tools for success, starting right now.

Author Bio:
The author of Never Say Diet and The Never Say Diet Personal Fitness Trainer, Chantel Hobbs is a motivational speaker, life coach, personal trainer, marathon runner, wife, and mother of four whose story has been featured on Oprah, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, the 700 Club, and the covers of People and First magazines. She appears weekly on two fitness-themed radio programs and promotes her One-Day Way Learning System on television. Visit Chantel at ChantelHobbs.com for fitness updates and coaching tips.

Back Cover Review:
One year ago, I read Chantel’s book Never Say Diet. That book introduced me to her common-sense approach to exercise and nutrition. One idea from her stuck with me all year…show up to exercise each day like it’s the job you’ve always wanted.

This year, I took her challenge and implemented much of what she suggested. Only seven months later, I had lost the weight that I set out to. I now weigh about twenty pounds less and am eating better than I have since I left home 16 years ago. And for the first time in my life – I love to exercise!

The One-Day Way includes some of her same ideas – but takes many aspects of it one step further and, most importantly, one day at a time. I still want to kick my workouts up a notch – or several notches. Her encouragement to do a new exercise for thirty minutes one day or to work out for an extra fifteen minutes with increased intensity in intervals are some very practical ways to do this. She also addresses the topic of learning to not let food have control over you – something that I still need help with. One thing that she encourages the reader to do, among other things, is to fast from one meal once a week to break the power of food over your life.

Another unique approach – and I don’t know how any diet could be successful any other way – is her concept of rewarding yourself on a weekly basis. I know for myself, if I choose to not eat something for an extended amount of time (for example: chocolate), when I finally do, I over-indulge. From my experience this past year, if you are “rewarding” yourself on a regular basis, you are less likely to over-do it!

This book is the next best thing to having a personal trainer. Chantel writes in such a relational way that you just might feel like you have one anyway!

This book was provided for review by the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group.

Pure Foundations Series: God Made Your Body and How God Makes Babies by Jim Burns

Children's curiosity often prompts them to ask questions you, as a parent, don't feel ready or able to answer. But it doesn't have to be that way. Dr. Jim Burns, family expert and award-winning author, offers a valuable resource for those uncomfortable--even dreaded--conversations.

With biblical, age-appropriate information and illustrations, these books (for children ages 3-5 and 6-9) to the basics of human sexuality. Answering questions such as how boys and girls are different and where babies come from, these books also emphasize how children are a part of God's wonderful plan for families.

About The Author:

Jim Burns, PhD, founded the ministry of HomeWord in 1985 to bring help and hope to struggling families. Jim hosts the radio broadcast HomeWord with Jim Burns, which is heard daily in over eight hundred communities nationwide, and speaks to thousands around the world each year. He is an award-winning author, whose books include Teaching Your Children Healthy Sexuality. Jim and his wife, Cathy, have three grown daughters and live in California.

Back Cover Review:

When I was growing up, people just didn’t talk about this stuff. At least not in our family. Our grandparents grew up in a Victorian-influenced culture where you didn’t talk about your bodies, sexuality or any kind of stuff. It wasn’t proper. Well, after being around friends who have approached this subject and opened up the lines of communication about it with their kids, I decided that it seemed like a good thing to do, but how?

In a world, where the subject of sex is overt and all around as – and a topic of interest even for elementary kids – if we don’t talk about it to our kids (in ways appropriate for their age), they’re going to get information, accurate or not, from somewhere else.

It doesn’t mean that this was easy for me – or Chet – to talk about with our kids. I had trouble breathing as I read the first book – for 3-5 year olds! Obviously, I have issues. Chet had read a book for fathers of daughters. It said that it is a good idea for it to be the father’s responsibility to approach this topic with his girls. So, he read God Made Your Body to them. His voice sounded strangled as he read and I couldn’t stop giggling – not the best start, but we did it. Can you imagine if we tried to talk about it with them and didn’t have a book to start off with? Oh my.

Our oldest daughter got the giggles as we read – probably due to my influence. Our youngest daughter was concerned about how a baby gets out of the mother’s womb and that the baby was crying after it was born. But we’ve started and I’m thankful for this series. It seems very age appropriate to me and introduces the basic body parts of a boy and girl in a very natural conversational way (something that we don’t seem capable of yet) and “how babies are made” in its most basic form. I wanted some sort of book like this to get us started and am all the more grateful that there’s Christian-based material to use.

Needless to say, I almost passed out when I read How God Makes Babies…to myself, LOL. Yes, I have personal issues to work through apparently (thank goodness I have a little time to get over it), but it looks like an excellent way to continue this conversation with our children. It is my hope to continue with this series by Jim Burns as they get older too. The material seems very age appropriate, is more than helpful in introducing and continuing the conversation of the birds and the bees and says it so much better than we would!

This book was provided for review by Bethany House a division of Baker Publishing Group.

40 loaves: Breaking Bread with Our Father Each Day by c.d. baker - Book Giveaway and Back Cover Review

Leave a comment on this post by midnight, December 23, 2009 to enter the giveaway for a copy of 40 Loaves - MERRY CHRISTMAS! :)

I'm sorry, no overseas entries please.

Why don’t I have more faith?
Why am I so bored with Jesus?
Why don’t I feel connected at church?

These are the types of questions the religious establishment often makes it uncomfortable, if not impossible, to ask. And by asking them, C. David Baker, author of 40 Loaves: Breaking Bread with Our Father Each Day hopes to start a conversation in people’s hearts, then with others, and ultimately with God. Many circles of Christianity have led us to believe that certainty and confidence are the proof of true spirituality; questions are discouraged.

But Jesus offered his followers an ongoing conversation—a relationship built around a free, open-ended discussion. Questions were encouraged. They were often impertinent, sometimes alarming, and the religious establishment was distinctly uncomfortable with them … just as it is today.

“40 Loaves is something of a collection of the kinds of questions I felt finally free to ask of myself and of my relationship with Christ,” says Baker. “It’s my belief that these questions are shared by many others who long for the freedom to simply ask them out loud. I hope this book becomes a platform that frees others to search their hearts more deeply and be fed with the Bread of life.”

Each “loaf” here is a big question that stimulates discussion, investigation, and contemplation; it will take hours—or days—to digest. Conversational, inviting, disarming, and real, 40 Loaves nourishes self-examination and offers validation for those who feel discouraged, guilty, or even shamed when the realities of their lives don’t match up with the ideals of the Christian establishment.

C. David Baker founded an award-winning business before redirecting his career to write full-time from his small farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. (The same area I call home!) He is the author of eight books, including six novels, one of which was nominated for a Christy Award. He has contributed articles to the Christian History Institute’s international publication Glimpses, and to Christian Singles magazine. Baker has a Master’s degree in theological studies from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
 
Back Cover Review:
C.D. Baker has a way of getting to the heart of the matter and laying the motives of our hearts wide open – and then dealing with it with the heart and compassion of a loving father. I believe that this is a gift that Daddy God has given him too.
 
I’ve found a treasure in c.d. baker’s devotionals – 1st in 101 Cups of Water and now in 40 loaves!
 
40 Loaves is written with the complete transparency and vulnerability of c.d. baker in a way that opened me up and got to the heart of the matter. This is the best kind of devotional! In this devotional, he asks questions that many of us are afraid to ask such as: Why do I want Jesus in my life? Why do I fear unbelief? Why am I so confused about finding God’s will? Why do I avoid sharing my faith? Why is my life such a mess? Why have I stopped dreaming?

Each devotional asks questions that challenged me to dig deeper and honestly probe at the source of my struggles…and ends with a short, but beautiful prayer written by people of faith over that centuries that also longed to honestly face themselves at the foot of the Cross and sit at the table of Jesus’ grace and be filled…and healed.

This book was provided for review by the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group.

The Familiar Stranger by Christina Berry

This week, the

Christian Fiction Blog Alliance

is introducing

The Familiar Stranger

Moody Publishers (September 1, 2009)

by

Christina Berry


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Single mother and foster parent, Christina Berry carves time to write from her busy schedule because she must tell the stories that haunt her every waking moment. (Such is the overly dramatic description of an author's life!) She holds a BA in Literature, yet loves a good Calculus problem, as well. All that confusion must have influenced her decision to be team captain of a winning team on Family Feud.

Her debut novel, The Familiar Stranger, released from Moody in September and deals with lies, secrets, and themes of forgiveness in a troubled marriage. A moving speaker and dynamic teacher, Christina strives to Live Transparently--Forgive Extravagantly!

Her work has also appeared in The Secret Place, The Oregonian, and Daily Devotions for Writers.





ABOUT THE BOOK

Craig Littleton's decision to end his marriage would shock his wife, Denise . . . if she knew what he was up to. When an accident lands Craig in the ICU, with fuzzy memories of his own life and plans, Denise rushes to his side, ready to care for him.

They embark on a quest to help Craig remember who he is and, in the process, they discover dark secrets. An affair? An emptied bank account? A hidden identity? An illegitimate child?

But what will she do when she realizes he's not the man she thought he was? Is this trauma a blessing in disguise, a chance for a fresh start? Or will his secrets destroy the life they built together?

If you would like to read the first chapter of The Familiar Stranger, go HERE