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I Like a Little Grit with My Story Okay, anyone who reads my reviews knows this already–if I’m going to be spending a few hours with a book, I want to be engaged. Challenged. Drawn deep into the hearts the characters. I want to have preconceived notions challenged, I want to think, I want to feel. And I want to do all this because the characters are people. You know, like, with problems. Flaws. Difficulties. When I was a teenager I enjoyed the simple stories with the nearly-perfect people, but now? Please, please give me someone with a real, honest-to-goodness struggle! I guess it’s time for a disclaimer: I’m boring. As in, no skeletons in my closet at all. I never curse. I hate the taste of alcohol. I saved myself for marriage. For that matter, my husband’s the only man I’ve ever kissed. I’ve never lost a love or had to make a really tough decision that drastically altered the course of my future. But don’t think for a minute that I haven’t lived. My best friend was widowed after two years of marriage. I’ve lost grandparents, uncles, teachers, and bosses to death–cancer, accident, and suicide. I’ve witnessed the ravages of divorce in those dearest to me. I’ve watched people I admire lose faith–and others gain it. I’ve had to defend my beliefs to people who were everything from indifferent to belligerent. In short? I know what real life is. I’ve lived it, even if most of my experience comes from watching those I love go through the really hard things. I understand that some people insulate themselves, and that when they pick up a book, they want that to insulate them, too. I respect that. I even admire the people that can weed out the secular so much from their lives. They really take "not of the world" seriously. But in my experience, that only goes so far. Because the fact remains that we’re in the world. It’s all around us. We have to interact with the people who are of it. And just speaking personally, those people are more willing to listen to my views when I haven’t already condemned them for their own. In my experience, you can never completely escape the ugliness, the undercurrents, the waiting shadows of the world. The challenge is overcoming it–the beauty is that Christ already claimed the victory for us. So when I pick up a novel, I like to see that struggle to overcome. That’s what I really appreciate about authors like DiAnn Mills, Tamera Alexander, and MaryLu Tyndall. They grab their characters’ pasts by the horns and wrestle them into the ground. They fight, they hurt, they battle with themselves, and they rise up like the proverbial phoenix to a victory that is all the sweeter for the bitterness they endured. That’s what first attracted me to the great Francine Rivers’s work–and the lack of which turned me off to a few others. I’m a pretty controlled person–you can ask anyone who knows me. One of my college professors actually said that "such temperance is unhealthy in one so young." Hmm, don’t think I buy that, but I can see his point–because it’s the extremes that make for an interesting story. It’s what I like to read. What I like to write. Guess that means no autobiography is waiting in my future, but hey–who needs one? I don’t want to read about people exactly like me–I want to read about people I’d be friends with. People who have lost, who have loved unwisely, who have fought themselves and won. I don’t want perfect princesses–but then, even the original fairy tales know to put some grit between the once upon a time and the happily ever after, don’t they?
Wanna give me your take? Questions, comments, silly statements? Email me at BtL@ChristianReviewofBooks.com View Other Columns: Celebrating the Tradition |
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