Before Summer's End
by Johnnie Alexander, Brenda S. Anderson, Eleanor Bertin, Sara Davison, Deb Elkink, Stacy Monson, Marion Ueckermann
Publication Date June 3, 2020
Genres: Christian Fiction
Written for: Adults
Pages: 375
Synopsis:
Home should be the place you run to for shelter from the world, but what if the family members who should love and protect you are the ones who have hurt you the most?
Johnnie Alexander -- A Stranger Comes to Springlight
Brenda S. Anderson -- Hot Cocoa Summers
Eleanor Bertin -- Grounded
Sara Davison -- Ten Bottles of Sand
Deb Elkink -- Blue Genes
Stacy Monson -- A Summer of Reckoning
Marion Ueckermann -- In an English Vintage Garden
When trust is shattered between brothers and sisters, parents and children, or husbands and wives, will God bless their tentative steps back to each other by healing and restoring the most important relationships in their lives?
I would like to thank Just Read Publicity Tours, Mosaic Collection for giving me a copy of this book. This gift did not influence my opinion or review.
Purchase Links
I have enjoyed the various Mosaic Collections. Before Summer’s End is no exception! The variety in the stories is vast. While the faith element in some of them was more subtle than in others, and though I liked certain ones more than I liked others, I recommend this collection. If you find a story you don’t care for, skip to the next. There are stories here to please a variety of tastes.
Johnnie Alexander’s A Stranger Comes to Springlight had the feel of an old-fashioned small town that could have placed it at almost any time in the past century. I loved the voice of the story and the style of the writing, which is vastly different from the other stories of this author’s that I’ve read.
Brenda S. Anderson’s Hot Cocoa Summers was a wonderful story of redemption. I appreciated the way I first loved and then was disgusted at Chad, the charming barista. Though a short story, it covers the passage of several years and did that extremely well, not covering unimportant details and still conveying the sense that the time had passed.
Eleanor Bertin’s Grounded is the first story I’ve read that deals with the mandatory self-isolation due to the Coronavirus. It was humorous to me that Lissa was even more out of touch with things going on in the world than I often am and how she wasn’t even aware things were shutting down. While I didn’t care much for the choices that left her alone in her isolation and those she made while in isolation, I loved the ending and felt it was well done.
Oh, my heart!! Sara Davison’s Ten Bottles of Sand was such a treat! As with Hot Cocoa Summers, it covers several years. It was such a beautiful journey with Nancy learning to trust and to see things differently than her mother had always taught her. She learned that living in a way that is always “safe” doesn’t necessarily mean truly living.
In Deb Elkink’s Blue Genes, twin sisters who had grown apart are thrown together and are forced to deal with the events that had divided them. This was not as much to my taste as the other stories and the “resolution” felt like it left much to be resolved.
Stacy Monson’s A Summer of Reckoning is the prequel to When Mountains Sing and tells Dawson’s story. His transformation was slowly revealed. I appreciated that the author didn’t make things easy for him and that his wasn’t an “insta-conversion”. It was very believable and very touching.
I loved the start to Marion Ueckermann’s In an English Vintage Garden when Ellen saw the email about the inheritance she had received! Her reaction was just what mine would have been. And hopefully yours – if not, please be more careful with email you receive from unsolicited sources. 🙂 While I know that it is highly unlikely that attorneys will contact anyone regarding a legal issue via email, it did add a touch of fun. The secret Ellen’s mother, Lillian kept from her was hinted at enough that I wasn’t surprised but that didn’t diminish my appreciation for the story.
More Shareables
About Brenda S. Anderson
Brenda S. Anderson writes gritty and authentic, life-affirming fiction. She is a member of the American Christian Fiction Writers, and is Past-President of the ACFW Minnesota chapter, MN-NICE, the 2016 ACFW Chapter of the Year. When not reading or writing, she enjoys music, theater, roller coasters, and baseball (Go Twins!), and she loves watching movies with her family. She resides in the Minneapolis, Minnesota area with her husband of 30-plus years and one sassy cat.
About Deb Elkink
Deb Elkink writes from her cottage on the banks of a lovely creek in the rolling hills of southern Alberta, Canada, a stone’s throw from the Montana border. Her award-winning fiction—literary with a theological twist—incorporates travel and taste buds and the tumults of the heart.
About Eleanor Bertin
In a fit of optimism at age eleven, Eleanor Bertin began her first novel by numbering a stack of 100 pages. Two of them got filled with words. Lifelines, her first completed novel, was published in 2016, followed by Pall of Silence in 2017, a memoir about her late son Paul.
She holds a college diploma in Communications and worked in agriculture journalism until the birth of her first child. The family eventually grew to include one daughter and six sons (the youngest with Down syndrome) whom she home-educated for 25 years.
Eleanor grew up on a Manitoba farm, spent 20 years in cities and towns, and in the past 16 years has come full circle to embrace country life again. She lives with her husband and youngest son, Timothy, amidst the ongoing renovation of a century home in central Alberta where she reads, writes, sweeps up construction rubble and blogs about a sometimes elusive contentment at jewelofcontentment.wordpress.com.
About Johnnie Alexander
Johnnie Alexander creates characters you want to meet and imagines stories you won’t forget. Her award-winning debut novel, Where Treasure Hides (Tyndale), is a CBA bestseller. She writes contemporaries, historicals, and cozy mysteries, serves on the executive board of Serious Writer, Inc., co-hosts an online show called Writers Chat, and interviews inspirational authors for Novelists Unwind. She also teaches at writers conferences and for Serious Writer Academy. Johnnie lives in Oklahoma with Griff, her happy-go-lucky collie, and Rugby, her raccoon-treeing papillon.
About Marion Ueckermann
MARION UECKERMANN’s passion for writing was sparked when she moved to Ireland with her family. Her love of travel has influenced her contemporary inspirational romances set in novel places. Marion and her husband again live in South Africa, but with two gorgeous grandsons hanging their hats at the house next door, their empty nest’s no longer so empty.
About Sara Davison
Sara Davison is the author of the romantic suspense novel, The Watcher, the romantic suspense series, THE SEVEN TRILOGY, and the upcoming suspense series, THE NIGHT GUARDIANS SERIES. She has been a finalist for eight national writing awards, including Best New Canadian Christian author, a Carol Award, and two Daphne du Maurier Awards for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense. She is a Word and Cascade Award winner. Sara has a degree in English Literature from Queen’s University. She currently resides in Ontario, Canada with her husband Michael and their three children, all of whom she (literally) looks up to.
About Stacy Monson
Stacy Monson is the award-winning author of The Chain of Lakes series, including Shattered Image, Dance of Grace, and The Color of Truth, as well as Open Circle. Her stories reveal an extraordinary God at work in ordinary life. Residing in the Twin Cities, she is the wife of a newly-retired juggling, unicycling physical education teacher, a proud mom, and doting grandma.
Oh my, what a beautiful review! So very glad you enjoyed the stories in Before Summer’s End! And THANK YOU for all the amazing graphics! I will put them to good use. 😀