The Searchers by Joseph Loconte

The Searchers was an interesting read.  Purported to be about the men on the road to Emmaus after the death of their hoped-for Messiah, Jesus, I felt like it had very little to do with them.  However, as Loconte fills the book with scores of current pop culture references to relate how those men must have felt, it did do the job of being "A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt."  Those references kept me interested, and it supplied some new ways of looking at very old ideas, mainly doubt in the face of great seeming tragedy.

The book was intriguing, and I was interested with how Loconte related grief felt after recent tragedies like the Japanese tsunami in 2011 to the grief those men felt as they walked away from Jerusalem over 2000 years ago.  They were different types of grief felt by people in vastly different cultures, and yet grief is a universal feeling that no human can avoid.  Jesus met with the men on the road to Emmaus amidst their grief, just as He meets with us today.

I found the book encouraging and hopeful.  The way Loconte describes events was informative and entertaining and kept me wanting to read.

I received this book free from booksneeze.com in exchange for my honest review.

Stand By Me by Neta Jackson

This book is about two women, one a young college girl practically disowned by her parents for becoming a Christian and abandoning pre-med studies to study at a Christian college. The other is a middle aged woman having trouble with her second husband and runaway adult daughter. Both women are committed to Christ, but when their lives cross, don't see eye to eye with each other. The story is about how it turns out they both need each other and tells of how God can use the most unusual or unexpected person to bring about change in our lives.

The story was pretty good, it flowed well and kept me reading. The characters were sometimes pretty annoying in their stubborn habits, and the women of the Yada Yada prayer group were cheesy (as evidenced by the name of the group!). Not really a style of book I would read again.

I received this book for free from booksneeze.com to review.