A clear and unabashedly uplifting set of encouragements for Christian women seeking men who are worthy of their time—and...
A debut guide aims to help Christian women find true love.
“I want you to recognize how beautiful you are,” writes Van Pelt in her trim work. “You are a treasure waiting to be found.” This simple, straightforward note of personal religious hope runs throughout the inspirational book and undergirds its sentiments about how the faithful should live in contemporary society. “God is so in love with you!” the author writes. “He built this whole world around us.” Throughout the volume, she asserts that she seeks God for clarity, and perhaps as a result, her own book’s precepts show an attractive level of lucidity. She sees the women of the Bible as “power players” operating behind the scenes of the male-dominated stories. She imports this kind of thinking to the modern world, telling her female readers that there are subtle ways in which they must “woo” the men of their dreams, sheltering them, shoring up their faith, and bolstering their strength in all things. She lays out in detail seven steps to achieve this: ambition, vision, belief, a road map, resolve to see it all through despite setbacks, faith in God’s plan for you, and a commitment to growth, both personal and spiritual. In explaining this outline, Van Pelt is a uniformly inviting and enthusiastic companion for her audience. She encourages her readers to ask God to give them “wit and wisdom so you know how to speak in such a way that you attract hearers”—with the most important of those hearers implicitly being the “one man” God has sent to Earth for each of them. The underlying question suggested in this—why would any effort at all be needed to win the affection of someone put on Earth by God in order to give it?—goes unaddressed throughout, but that seems at least partly by design. Van Pelt’s emphasis is more on the interpersonal mechanics of Christians finding fellow Christians than on any spiritual metaphysics that might be involved.
A clear and unabashedly uplifting set of encouragements for Christian women seeking men who are worthy of their time—and their faith.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-8611-8
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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