Fiction Friday #13 - Camp Reads So Far
I have a lot of time to read when I'm working at camp because I just sit and answer the phones and chat with any people who show up at my window. Therefore, I've read a few books in the last couple weeks, and I thought I would share my thoughts on them with you people.
weaves in many directions to include the mysterious and high-profile death of young girl seventeen years prior. The team has to dig through lies and political cover-ups to find the truth and bring closure to the girl's mother. Throughout the case, the team's medical examiner struggles with her family and her past. Her story is hard at times but a great addition to the book!The final book in the series is Blood Lines. In this book the team is investigating the car-jacking of a Marine and his wife. Their suspect is the son of a notorious criminal and is not willing to go down easily. In the process, one member of the NCIS team is injured and forced to take some time off. However when his family's past is pulled into the case, he must return to work and figure out how to place the criminals in jail no matter the personal cost. I think I enjoyed this book the most of the three, mainly because it involved more of the team's personal lives than the other two did. Overall, all three books were truly enjoyable with highly engaging stories.
After finishing three super intense-crime novels, I chose to read a series by Melody Carlson to embrace the lighter side of fiction. I've read a number of Melody's other books, so I felt like I knew what to expect when I started reading her 86 Bloomberg Place series. I was a bit wrong. The four books that make up this series were quite a bit different from other books I've read of hers. The series centers on four young women who start out as complete strangers sharing a house, which means they end up sharing their lives. Megan, Lelani, Anna, and Kendall all come from completely different backgrounds and have to find a way to meld their lives together to get through the year-long lease they all signed. I Heart Bloomberg (bk1), Let Them Eat Fruitcake (bk2), Spring Broke (bk3), and Three Weddings and a Bar mitzvah (bk4) are definitely interesting as they follow these four twenty-somethings through the ups and downs of loss, job searches, crazy families, and relationships. I think my biggest issue with them is that the characters put very little effort into their spiritual lives, yet they seemed to grow immensely by the end. It often felt like the Christian aspect of the book was added as an afterthought to the main stories of their lives. Definitely not my favorite "sisterhood" series, but not terrible. The stories are pretty crazy and entertaining. They just lack the authenticity found in many other books.
My final book of the last few weeks is not a fiction book...crazy I know! However, it was co-written by Robin Jones Gunn (my long-time favorite) and Alyssa Joy Bethke (a young woman I truly admire), so I was pretty excited to read it. Spoken For: Embracing Who You Are and Whose You Are is a book written specifically for young women to help them understand that their value comes from Christ, not the pressures of our culture. They take a long look at what it means to belong to Christ and experience the amazing love story God wrote when he sent his Son to die for us. I truly enjoyed the lessons they were sharing in this book and would highly recommend it for young women, especially as a group study! I thought multiple times while I was reading it that I would love to go through it with either some girlfriends or some younger/youth girls because it truly challenges you to evaluate how you see yourself and how you view Christ. I read through this fairly quickly because I was pretty excited for it, so I am looking forward to maybe working through it at a slower pace sometime in the not-too-distant future.