Waiting for Morning (Forever Faithful, Book 1) [Paperback] Review

"There was a horrific jolt and the defending sound of twisting, sparking metal and shattering glass. Jenny screamed, but it was to late. The explorer took to the air like a child's toy spinning wildly and coming to rest wrapped around a telephone pole a hundred feet away." In Karen Kingsbury's Waiting For Morning, the tragedies represent life experiences. This book is interesting and heart warming. It is hard to put down.
Hannah Ryan waits for her two girls and wonderful husband to come home from a summer camping trip. It is a perfect Christian family with nothing missing or where anything could go wrong. They got in a wreck with an unstable drunk driver. Instantly, her oldest daughter and husband died. The youngest daughter lives, but goes through severe trauma. Hannah tries to convict the driver of first-degree murder. It will be the biggest charge for drunk driving in the history of California. At the same time, it just makes things insoluble between her daughter and herself when both are bewildered about the accident.
Kingsbury makes the characters very easy to understand. Hannah Ryan is portrayed as a dynamic character in direct characterization. Jenny, her daughter, a very round character, struggles with so many difficulties after the deaths of her family members. Both struggle with unspeakable feelings of sorrow and rage that fuse into one chilling purpose for living. All Hannah wants is revenge against Brian Wesley, the drunk driver that causes her all the pain. In fury of things going on, Hannah shuts the Lord out of her life, the biggest mistake of all.
It is not very difficult nor too easy to follow along with. The book's superior ways in the dialogue is extremely intelligible. Although the characters are older, the reading is not too mature for younger teens. The language is internal. It speaks to the inside of your heart. The tone can make a person change completely, or can shake them up. It is also shocking at times with a touch of thrill.
When the holidays arrive, everything becomes a lot harder for everyone. The Novel takes place in a city in the mists of California. It takes place around the time of holidays and vacations, which makes it more difficult on Jenny and Hannah.
The story, told in third person omniscient, revolves around Hannah. A couple of flashbacks take place while she remembers memories, and looks back at old pictures. The foreshadowing works greatly and proves that someone can live for something that they cannot find in themselves. "I don't need God anymore..." becomes the realistic nature of this novel. Horrible circumstances make many people question their faith.
Waiting For Morning, by Karen Kingsbury, a fantastic book on true-life experiences, keeps the reader on edge, waiting for the next sight. It can have a huge effect on a person from laughing, to crying, to smiling. It can and will leave the readers in true amazement. If people need to find themselves or find the truth in the Lord during hard battles, this book is wonderful.

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Hannah Ryan is the mother of two adorable little girls and the wife of a doting husband. Her life is perfect -- until the night her husband and eldest daughter are ripped away from her by a drunken driver. Torn by grief and rage, Hannah finds her faith -- like that of Jeremiah weeping over Jerusalem -- tested to the limits. As she walks the long road of her own modern-day Lamentations, she must learn to forgive... and finally discover that God's mercies truly are new every morning. Sometimes the road home is only found by letting go.

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Five Good Minutes: 100 Morning Practices To Help You Stay Calm & Focused All Day Long [Paperback] Review

This book was absolutely perfect for me. My mother gave it to me as a gift and I love it.I am a mother of 2 children under the age of 5 and have practically no time for myself.These 5 minute exercises have really helped to center me for the day.I seem to be much more relaxed with the kids.The exercises are quick and easy and don't require tons of time.This is the perfect gift.


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What difference can five minutes make in the crazy, nonstop course of a sixteen-hour day? For people feeling overwhelmed with responsibility, bored with the same tired routine, or frustrated about how to create meaning in their lives, a little time well spent can lead to extraordinary changes. This book shows readers how to dramatically improve their lives in just a few moments each day. The concept is powerfully simple: Readers take the time each morning to be fully present, to set a clear intention for themselves, and to really engage in any of 100 fun and easy-to-follow practices. Soon they will discover that amazing things can happen in just five minutes.
The book provides guided imagery, relaxation, mindfulness, and meditation practices-fun activities that relieve stress and create meaning and purpose in the reader's day. These practices help readers feel good, get motivated, and become inspired to change their lives for the better. Over time, these activities become guideposts readers will return to throughout the day, providing energy and inspiration when they need them most. In other words, the time readers of this book take for themselves in the morning might just be the five good minutes that change their lives.

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Morning Notes: 365 Meditations To Wake You Up (Prather, Hugh) (Paperback) Review

"Over the years I have resisted several requests for a book of 365 thoughts because I felt there were a number of excellent ones on the market, and I didn't think I had much to add. But a year or so ago I noticed that I have certain ideas that I keep turning to when I wake up in the morning...So this book is a little different in that it contains what I personally need to hear-over and over." - From the book

The thoughts we think upon awakening have a ripple affect. If our minds are filled with anxious anticipation, regret, self-loathing, worry, or judgment, our day will likely unfold with chaos in its wake.

Fortunately, author Hugh Prather has written a delightful devotional filled with sage advice, spiritual clarity, and practical ideals in his book Morning Notes: 365 Meditations to Wake You Up. Each meditation brings readers closer to present moment awareness, gentleness, forgiveness, and stillness.

Some of the wonderful observations in Morning Notes include:

"Problems do not justify unkindness...My chronic need to rush signals that I am willing to attack my body and fracture my mind. Kindness to myself as well as to others must be a part of the process or else it is ultimately meaningless."

"The journey back to God is the journey back to now. To ascend into heaven is to sink so deeply into now that we lose interest in past regrets and anxious anticipations...To think about what it means to be present is not to be present. Little children are so unsophisticated that they run around, giggle, stare at strangers, taste rocks, and just altogether have way too much fun. They're so clueless, they don't even know they have mastered advanced metaphysical concepts and mystical techniques. Today, I too will practice being clueless."

"The divine does not `test' us or give us `trials' before blessing us. How could God increase pressure, expand the rules, or set new demands if divine Love is changeless and the peace of God is eternal? We know when we are hearing the voice of God because the opposite happens. Suddenly all the pressure is lifted and we feel loved just the way we are. This is also the gift I must give those around me."

"How could one person's way possibly be superior to another person's way if God is leadings us all? If I believe that my spiritual path is superior, my path is not spiritual. Spirit is One. The divine doesn't contain degrees of correctness. Either we all share the same Truth and ultimate destiny, or there is no truth and we are lost in a reality of private perception and momentary interpretation."

I enjoyed reading Morning Notes: 365 Meditations to Wake You Up all the way through, finding much wisdom, humor, and spiritual nourishment in its pages. This book isn't divided by date, only number, so you can pick it up at your leisure-reading one passage at a time or perhaps a few. I look forward to dipping into this book at random, whenever I need a pick-me-up or a daily dose of a potent spiritual vitamin.


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This is a book of great beginnings-365 of them! How we start each and every day affects everything-body, mind, spirit, family, work. We can begin in a combative mood, fighting with how things are, or we can begin in a peaceful mood, helping ourselves construct things the way we want them to be.Hugh Prather, in his writing and his life, opts for the latter. And in these Morning Notes, he invites us to live as if we think our world and the people in it are worth caring about, worth taking time for, worth changing.Love, forgiveness, self-healing, change-yes! Self-loathing, judgment, anger, prevaricating-no! The former help us realize our Oneness within ourselves, with other human beings, and with God. The latter prevent this realization. These 365 simple meditations take us a long way toward our spiritual home. Individually and as a whole they speak to the spiritual task of the 21st century-to wake up to our own responsibility for what happens to us.

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Winter Morning Walks : 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (Poetry Series) [Paperback] Review

Fabric: the opening, dedicatory poem sketches a man's early morning walk along a road, a road that reminds him of an unrolled length of cloth, and the dark fields in the distance seem like the counter in the store his father worked at. He remembers his father behind the counter unrolling a bolt of cloth for the boy and saying "you can make something special with this."
Kooser, fighting cancer when he wrote these postcards, continues to use his naturally metaphorical imagination to transform common things and daily events into well-timed and expertly sculpted poems. There are at least a dozen gems in this collection and memorable metaphors and similes on nearly every page. The postcards--poems no longer than a page, and mostly much shorter than that--form a diary of sorts, not only a response to and a subtle record of his battle with cancer, but a testimony to his joy in the heartbreaking beauty of existence.
Kooser uses items from what Randall Jarrell called "the dailiness of life" to slide back to the past and to clarify the present. The "material"--his father, his mother, his uncle, roadside refuse, the moon, birds, graveyards, robes, a snowflake, the creaking snow, bolts of cloth--is embroidered beautifully and succinctly.
This book will lodge in the memory and engender respect for the overlooked yet rich fabric of our daily lives.

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Secrets of the Morning (Cutler Family) [Mass Market Paperback] Review

While I read the first book, Dawn, cover to cover, I only skimmed this one and was glad I did.While it covers most of the topics one can expect in a sequel, Dawn should have used her head and avoided a disaster.

Dawn's scheming grandmother has decided to wash her hands of this aweful, dirty little secret she tried to hide by sending her away to an exclusive school for dramatic arts in New York.As it turned out (sorry to reveil things from the first book if no one has read that), Dawn's mother, the twitering bird in a golden cage, had an affair with an entertainer and became pregnant.Fearing the stigma of an illegitimate heir to the family fortune, like in some gothic novel (which this just happens to be), baby Dawn was given away to be raised by another family as theirs.But, as some twist of fate, the illegitimate heir to the throne has resurfaced and now she wants her out of there again.So, off Dawn goes to New York under the false pretense of artistic talent.

Here Dawn meets some handsome Broadway star (who isn't gay! Talk about fiction!) and, quite typically, becomes engrossed, allows herself to be taken advantage of, is abandoned and left carrying her own illegitimate child.Apples don't fall far from the tree, as it seems.It was a disapointment, the story wasn't half as juicy as the first in this series.Of course, this is fiction, and in the real world we would hope that someone can have at least a 50/50 chance of pulling themselves up out of the gutter and not repeating the mistakes their parents made.Had she done the smart thing and not let herself be taken advantage of, there wouldn't be a story.

It has enough dirt to make readers want to read the next in the series, but this reader had already outgrown it and decided not to continue.

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Shadowed by her tortured past, Dawn has a bright new life of glimmering hopes...
Dawn can hardly believe she's a student at one of New York City's best music schools. Now her most precious wish, to become a singer, can come true. But Dawn still dreams about Jimmy, her strong, intense boyfriend, and the love and anguished secrets they share.
Then Michael Sutton arrives, a new teacher at the school, a singing star and the most wonderful looking man Dawn has ever seen. Together they create a world of feeling Dawn has never known. In his embrace Dawn awakens to disturbing, unfamiliar desires, and Michael's promises offer a vision of music and romance forever...until he disappears.
Dazed by his cruelty, alone with the bitter fruit of his betrayal, Dawn becomes, once again, a victim of her grandmothers twisted schemes. Desolate, she clings to the tender hope that Jimmy will return and renew with her their deepest hearts' dream...

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Morning Spy, Evening Spy [Paperback] Review

Colin MacKinnon's "Morning Spy, Evening Spy" is a chilling look at the clandestine world of American intelligence before 9/11, written by a Middle East expert who lived and worked in Iran for years.The first person narrator is CIA Officer Paul Patterson, who tells his story both in the present tense and in flashback.The book opens with the shooting of an American named Ed Powers in a frontier province in Pakistan.Was Ed killed by al-Qaeda because of his government connections or because of his shady business dealings involving drugs and armaments?Another possible scenario is that Powers may have been the victim of a random act of terror.No one knows for sure, but American officials are anxious to find out who murdered Powers and why.An Afghan named Kareem may have some answers but he has suddenly vanished.

Patterson is a former Marine and a twenty-five year veteran of the CIA, who has lived in a number of overseas capitals during his long career.Patterson's obsession with his work has come at a price; Nan, his wife of twenty-four years, has filed for divorce.Paul is in a new relationship with Karen, a Washington-based journalist, who seems to be a bit more tolerant of his work-related responsibilities.

Paul's current title is special assistant for counterterrorism, and his colleague, Bill Cleppinger, heads the Antiterrorism Action Committee.Because the CIA has been under fire of late, Clep and Paul have been summoned by Jim McClennan, chief of staff of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, to answer some tough questions.Although the two pretend to be forthcoming, they carefully censor the truth and deliberately withhold key facts from the committee.

The plot of "Morning Spy, Evening Spy" is incredibly complex, and the book's large cast is, at times, a bit unwieldy.However, the strength of the story lies in the MacKinnon's insightful exploration of several key themes:Why did America's intelligence community fail to thwart the 9/11 hijackers?Does the CIA's penchant for secrecy go so far that its policies actually harm the people whom they are sworn to protect?How does a CIA officer, who is forced to lie frequently and keep secrets from his colleagues and family, survive emotionally?

There is a telling passage in which Paul chats with his friend, a Pakistani journalist named Amjad Afridi.Afridi tells Paul what is wrong with the CIA:"I sometimes think that you cannot see the living, breathing reality in front of your faces or the dangers that lurk just off to the side..." Afridi believes that the American intelligence community is in a state of denial.Furthermore, Afridi insists, the failure of America's leaders to come to terms with the truth about Islam, terrorism, and their own mistakes and shortcomings will hurt them badly someday.These words prove to be eerily prescient.Colin Mackinnon's "Morning Spy, Evening Spy" is a powerful and stunning indictment of a bureaucracy that has outlived its usefulness and has not kept pace with a geopolitical climate that is irrevocably different from the one that prevailed during the cold war years.

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Morning Sun: A Story of Hope, Purpose, and the Power of Family [Paperback] Review

MORNING SUN provides a strong autobiography as it tells of a son's search for a long-lost father. Merrick Alpert was six when his father abandoned their family, changing their lives. His journey to law school and a historic race for the White House is detailed along with his search to heal old wounds and confront the past in this powerful saga of family, perfect for any general lending library.

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Morning Sun is the true story of Merrick Alpert's journey across America to track down the father who abandoned him and his siblings 30 years earlier. This poignant and often-funny memoir chronicles Alpert's rise from near poverty in rural Connecticut and his successful pursuit of the American dream.

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