Love Story

What a story! It's tough and uncomfortable at times, but then, that's what living in sin will do to a person—in this case, characters. Yet, the journey toward salvation is clearly expressed and beautifully exhibited in this novel. Every person's love story with God is special and unique, and His love conquers all sin. I especially liked that Mrs. Kingsbury never once okayed the sin the characters chose. She always made the wrongness of sin and the guilt of conscience that follows such actions very clear.

She also gave these characters a spectacular finale... which you'll have to read in order to experience for yourself! (Just a little tease there for you.)

The profoundness of faith in Jesus grew deeper the more I read. That made for some pretty incredible final chapters. This book definitely got me thinking about the impact each of our lives can make for the Kingdom of Heaven, if we choose to do the will of God.

I particularly enjoyed this line: “Not all people who say they're a Christian actually are.” I have always believed this truth, based on Matthew 7:21, which states: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.” This is one of the rare times that I've heard a Christian leader say this same truth. That moment was quite beautiful in the story, because it was about more than faith but also about our actions proving our faith. Faith is an action, after all!

The hardback was a nice weight with easy-to-read text, and the audio book (I read both versions, by the way) was also lovely. The narrators did a fantastic job throughout. It was neat how they would switch off for the male/female POV characters. This was my first experience with that style of narration, and I rather enjoyed it.

The one thing that did somewhat bother me was that I felt I had missed so much character history by not having read the previous 20 or so books in the Baxter/Flannigan series. So I'm planning on rereading Love Story after I eventually catch up on all the various series that precede it.

Content: alcohol, premarital sex and pregnancy (lifestyle choices by non-Christian characters; never portrayed as correct choices), war violence, marital affair

Note: See my review on the hardback version for a full list of tags.