Gravel Road Musings

  Divided into five categories, the daily question conversation card set provides 100 questions designed to start conversations around the family table or anywhere you need some good conversation. I love this type of thing and think it would be a great thing to use when having friends over for coffee or even with your children to see what answers they come up with. This summer, Dave and I are spending hours together in the kitchen and I think it would be fun to use these questions to generate discussions that go beyond our normal conversations. The five categories are friends and family, travel, faith, just for fun, and then and now.  Let me give you some sample questions:  "Would you rather have ten close friends or one best friend? Why?" "If your house had a magic door that opened anywhere, where would you want it to lead?" "What helps you replace your fear with faith?" "You are organizing a big art museum heist. Who from your life do you pick for y...

  Set in the Appalachian Mountains during the Great Depression, Ann takes us on another journey exploring what life could have been like for those living in the mountains, this time as a packhorse librarian. Times are hard during the Great Depression and Tansy's father has left home looking for work and has not been heard from. Tansy loves books and takes the job as a librarian so she can help support her family. In spite of the inclement weather she sometimes has to go out in, she loves her job.  There are a lot of varied characters in the book and you have to love each one of them. Perdita is persnickety and cranky on the surface, but opens her heart to Coralee who desperately needs her help. I would love to describe more of the characters, but I feel like I give away too much of the story to do that. I loved the community feel in this book, the way people looked out for each other, the way they opened their home and shared what little they had to help the next person. I thi...

  This book was in the genre of historical romance and it certainly lived up to that title. I liked the premise of the book--a wealthy girl accused of stealing and ending up in a reformatory which helped to revolutionize her life. Rachel did some research on reformatories of that era and found that they were kind of a prelude to juvenile detention facilities. Then there was the quiet, socially inept dentist who was transformed. Rachel wanted to paint a dentist in a good light since she felt that so many dentists were given more of a negative connotation.  The writing was well done and the story line interesting. I thought Rachel did a good job of showing forgiveness and reconciliation, including the importance of being able to forgive one's self for their wrong actions. After spending five years in a reformatory with women from all walks of life, Hazel has a much deeper heart for "fallen women" as they were called in that day.  Over all, the story flowed almost too smooth...

  A 6-week guided journey to un-hurrying your heart Let me say first off, this is not the book "Growing Slow", this is the study guide that goes with the book. Let me also say, I haven't read the book and did not realize there was a book to go along with this study guide until I opened the study guide to look at and write this review.  I haven't done the study guide because I was in the middle of a different study book when it arrived, but I was intrigued with what I saw. Reading the book is not a requirement for this study guide, but it does provide a framework and some key concepts that help you apply the lessons learned. For my personality, I will probably try to read the book along with the study guide when I do it, but I was happy to see that I won't have to in case I can't get a hold of the book through the library or Net Galley.  Each week's study has six sessions: key Bible verse, My land (where Jennifer shares her struggles with Iowa), Your land H...

  I like Crystal Paine and I follow her on Instagram, but when I saw she wrote a parenting book, I will admit I raised my eyebrows a bit. Her kids are still in their early teens, what does she know about parenting? But then I read the book and I was hooked from the first chapter on.  The first couple chapters are so much deeper than parenting. They hit on the core of who we are as humans and on how we will live based on our beliefs. If I could describe in two words the premise of the book, I would say, "Live Loved".  Before we can be love-centered parents, we must first believe that we are loved, that God loves us and it is out of that love that we can love others.  "You can't give what you don't have. You can't love your kids well if you don't believe you are fully loved yourself." "Love-centered parenting is about wholeheartedly loving our kids because we know how much we are wholeheartedly loved by God."  Love-centered parenting isn'...

  Mother's Day.  Two simple words that I am sure invoke images of something for everyone of you. There are things that we expect on Mother's Day. We expect flowers or some form of gift. We expect all our chores to be done. We expect the Internet to explode with mother and children pictures, all dressed nicely and all smiling happily. That's the happy expectations of Mother's Day. But for others, Mother's Day is no different from any other day-nobody notices the sacrifices they make every day. Nobody acknowledges their sleepless night and long days. Nobody seemingly cares about them as a mom. And then there are still others for whom Mother's Day invokes sadness. On this day, they are once again reminded that their arms are empty or their children have walked away from their love or there is some other reminder of pain on that day. Mother's Day has meant numerous things to me through the years. Eight years ago, Mother's Day was more of a hidden grief known...

  Miriam, Moses and Aaron's sister. How much more than that do we really know about her? There are few references here and there: she led the singing after crossing the Red Sea, she was made a leper for a couple weeks for complaining about Moses, and not much more info than that is given. Jill takes this information and ad libs a story about Miriam, gives her a husband, children, and a life. Interspersed throughout are glimpses into Moses' life and also Zipporah's. Most is based on fiction and what Jill supposed to have happened.  I'm not a huge fan of Biblical fiction, but Jill does tell a good story and so I keep reading her books. I'm not sure what I'll do when the next book comes out though. While I enjoyed the story of Miriam, it took me awhile to get through it. That is no fault of the author's, it is simply not quite my genre of choice. I do like one thing Jill said in the "Note to the Reader" at the end of the book. "The thing this sto...