by Roseanna White | Dec 11, 2019 | Books, What We're Reading
Time to get back to book recommendations! This week I want to focus on contemporary fiction, and then I’ll wrap up the series on Friday with non-fiction.
Contemporary Fiction
Hold the Light and
Shine the Light
The second of these books released last spring, and while you could read them independently, they’re related, with best friends for heroines. Each book tackles hard subjects, but in a way that shows how God really shines through them. In
Hold the Light, Amber is an artist who learns she’s losing her eyesight. What do we do when everything we thought was important is stripped away? Paired with a beautiful love story, this one was one of my favorites–so when April said she was writing best-friend Shannon’s story too, I couldn’t wait! And was totally blown away.
Shine the Light highlights the homeless problem that Portland faces in a way that shows love along with reality, and also touches on PTSD and mental health issues. Most of all, though, they’re just fabulous stories with characters so real you’ll think of them at odd times forever after!
Hold the Light
Love, Lace, and Minor Alterations and Weddings, Willows, and Revised Expectations
Oh. My. Gracious. If you need a good laugh, look no further than these books!
Gilmore Girls meets
Say Yes to the Dress in these wedding-themed, snarky-voiced contemporary romances full of coffee addicts and potato-chip-obsessed heroines, and the men lucky enough to snag their hearts. The heroines are all best friends and roommates, so it’s super fun to follow them into “their stories”–In book 1, Izzy is a bridal consultant in her aunt’s bridal salon; in book 2, we actually get two romances as twin sisters Apryl and Courtney (reluctantly) accept the challenge of reviving their beloved grandmother’s antique shop, giving it a wedding-venue focus. So. Much. Fun!
Love, Lace, and Minor Alterations
Weddings, Willows, and Revised Expectations
Amazon |
Barnes and Noble |
READ
The If I Run series
by Terri Blackstock
This series actually finished up in 2018, but they remain some of my absolute favorite romantic suspense novels EVER, and the fact that you can buy the whole set makes them perfect for gifting. =) The storytelling is stunning, action-packed and thrilling, and the character development just left me thoroughly impressed. It’s hard to make the “romance” element as strong as I’d like it to be in romantic suspense novels because of how much action there is, but Terri Blackstock did a stellar job, building it over three books. Love these stories!!
Mind Games
This has to be one of the most unique reads of my 2019. The premise is that our heroine, a young FBI profiler, is the daughter a serial killer who was caught when she was a child. Needless to say, she has a few issues–and a burning need to catch others like her father. She’s legally changed her name, but her family’s past seems to be catching up to her when a new serial killer emerges and is pointed directly at her. A serial killer who clearly knows who her father was. Definitely a must-read!! The next book in the series just came out, and it’s my January book club read. I’m so looking forward to it!
A Secret to Die For
by Lisa Harris
This was another romantic suspense that left me thoroughly impressed. Lisa Harris writes a savvy heroine who holds her own against the bad guys she kind of inherits–she’s a psychologist, and one of her patients turns up dead…and has left her in possession of what the bad dudes are after. In addition to great characters, the plot of this one seriously makes you think.
Rachel’s Pick
Bradford Sisters Series
by Becky Wade
Sisters! Each with a challenge to overcome, a charming (and swoony) hero, hidden secrets, faith, redemption, and LOVE! Becky Wade’s series swept me off my feet and I am so in love with this family! There is even an accompanying Christmas story!
by Roseanna White | Dec 9, 2019 | Word of the Week
Today’s
Word of the Week–a revisit of a post from 2014–is less a word and more the etymology of a story.
Because my kids asked me after I went through the original St. Nicholas
story with them, when Rudolph came about, and I had no clue.
As
it turns out, our beloved reindeer was an invention of a writer named
Robert L. May, who was hired by the Montgomery Ward company to create an original piece of work for their annual children’s coloring book. May devised Rudolph in 1939…to some opposition. The publishers didn’t like the red nose idea. Red noses were associated with drunkards, which certainly wasn’t the image they wanted to portray. But when May had his illustrator friend create a cutesy deer character (they decided actual reindeer weren’t cute enough so went with a more familiar-to-Americans white-tailed variety) with a beaming red nose, the powers-that-be relented–and the story took off to amazing success. The original poem was written in the meter of “The Night Before
Christmas.”
The
song we all know and love was written a decade later, by the author’s brother-in-law. It remained the all-time best selling album in the country until the 80s!
The
stop-motion animation version that I grew up thinking was the only
Rudolph story worth watching, LOL, came about in 1964. Though very popular, this movie apparently doesn’t stick very accurately to the original poem. Which now makes me want to look up the original and see what’s been changed!
So there we have it. Our history of Rudolph. 😀
by Roseanna White | Dec 5, 2019 | Thoughtful Thursdays
A couple weeks ago, my church watched Mom’s Night Out–a rather hilarious Christian movie that we all thoroughly enjoyed. In one scene, the heroine’s little girl is drawing on the walls with markers–Mommy ends up putting frames around some of them rather than painting over them, which was adorable.
The next day, as I thought about that scene, my mind traveled back to my own days of small children and wall art. I honestly thought we’d escaped the writing-on-the-walls danger with Xoe–never did she do such a thing when she was young enough not to know better.
Then we started teaching her how to write.
For months afterward, we’d find her name scrawled on EVERYTHING. Walls. Counters. Cabinets. Dressers. Toybox. She would just walk around with a pen in her hand and put her name on absolutely any surface she found.
As I remembered those days, I smiled. Not because it was so funny at the time. But because as I thought of it, I also thought of that command God gave us–that His law should be written on our hearts.
Have you ever wondered what that should look like?
I think it looks a lot like a five-year-old with a pen in her hand and new knowledge filling her. Everything we touch, everything we see, everything we encounter should be a new opportunity for sharing that knowledge. For practicing the faith. For reveling in all He’s given us. Every blank surface should be an opportunity for showcasing how much we love Him.
If His word is written on our hearts, then we should also be scrawling His glorious name all over our lives.
by Roseanna White | Dec 2, 2019 | Word of the Week
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| 1922 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal |
Advent is upon us, so I figured I’d go back to my practice of sharing holiday-themed words each Monday. I think I’ve used pretty much all of them at some point or another, but I’ll try to highlight ones I haven’t looked at in a while, at least! This one I originally shared in 2012. =) (And if there’s one you’re curious about and want me to look up, just let me know!)
I
remember, as a child, writing stories and assignments for school around
this time of year and occasionally using the abbreviation “X-mas” for
Christmas. I remember teachers telling me not to use abbreviations in my
assignments, and I remember someone else (can’t recall who) telling me
not to use that one for Christmas because it just wasn’t right to take
Christ out of Christmas (or something to that effect) and replace it
with an X.
So
in my middling years, I refused to use it, thinking it somehow mean to
Jesus…then later I actually learned where it came from.
Pretty simple, really. The Greek word for Christ is Χριστός. You
might notice that first letter. Our X, though it’s the Greek “chi.” No
paganism here, no dark, dastardly scheming to remove Jesus from his
birthday. Scholars started this as a form of shorthand. The first
English use dates to 1755 in Bernard Ward’s History of St. Edmund’s College, Old Hall. Woodward, Byron, and Coleridge, to name a few, have used it to. And interestingly, similar abbreviations date way back. As early as 1100, the form “Xp̄es mæsse” for Christmas was used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
So.
It’s still an abbreviation and oughtn’t be used in formal writing and
more than w/ or b/c, but it’s also perfectly legitimate as what it is.
Always nice to discover something like that. =)
by Roseanna White | Nov 29, 2019 | Books, Sales
Do you brave the crowds for Black Friday shopping? I’ve done it a few times, but I admit it–I’m not a shopper. I hate crowds, and I’m not a browse-until-you-find-something-for-someone kind of girl. I’m instead a think-of-exactly-what-you-want-and-hunt-it-down kind of girl. Which means the online shopping options suit me really well. 😉 I do especially love that I can support small businesses online, so I love the Cyber Monday thing.
So of course, now that I have stores of my own online, I want to offer deals. 😀 Especially since I’m a firm believer in BOOKS AS GIFTS!!!!! (Why yes, that DOES deserve capitals and exclamation points, LOL.) And, just sayin’, signed books make especially great gifts in my humble opinion.
If you have books on your to-buy list this year, please feel free to use these coupon codes!
20% Off + Free Shipping on Orders over $50
Coupon Code: Christmas2019
20% Off + Free Shipping on Orders over $50
Coupon Code: HollyJolly2019
Join now and you’ll get to choose 2 of these FIVE options for the December e-books, including my Giver of Wonders!
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.