I've been reading

I love the Kindle app on my iPhone. Now, I even have the Kindle app on my Mac. I know what you are thinking and I relish the organic feel of a real book in my hands, too, but the Kindle app is so convenient that it didn't take me long to love it almost as much.

I love the fact that anytime I'm waiting or have downtime, I can pull out my phone and read, picking up right where I left off last time. One of the things I love the most is free… free books. Amazon has tons of free books for the Kindle and the selections change regularly. I've discovered Christian literature is often among the free offerings. I am having a wonderful time discovering new books and authors I might not have otherwise read.

In February, Daisy Chain: A Novel, by Mary DeMuth was free. I downloaded and read and fell in love with the Defiance, Texas Trilogy but more,  Mary's writing. I've read Christian literature before, and so often the characters were one dimensional and the plot so predictable. Even the dialogue is so banal that I can tell you what the characters are going to say ahead of time. In short, it bored me.

Not so with Daisy Chain. The characters, all of them, are round and real. Each of them struggle with faith and relationships and just the human condition. It didn't hurt that I grew up in a small Texas town and so I felt like I knew these people. Jed Pepper and Daisy Chance are two early adolescent best friends making their way through the trials of life, when Daisy disappears. Everyone in town handles the disappearance in his or her own way: some fear, some blame, some feel guilt, some grieve, some pray, some reject God. Most of them wrestle with all of those things, like real people do.

So far, I haven't bought a lot of Kindle books because the free ones have kept me satisfied, but as soon as I finished Daisy Chain, I downloaded A Slow Burn and gobbled it up. I can't wait for the final book. In fact, waiting makes me crazy.

I was telling a friend about the books, and googled Mary DeMuth. I found a lovely Christian writer who is passionate about her writing and her Jesus. I'm an official fan. If you follow my blog at all, or know me, you know that I am a writer…a frustrated one, but a writer just the same. The amount of encouragement and knowledge I have gleaned from Mary so far is invaluable. Jesus let me stumble across Mary and I'm a better for it.

Now, I've downloaded Thin Places. I've only made it through a few chapters because the glut emotions that the book is churning. I've even read a couple of chapters to my Hero and he cried. I'm not ready to tell you about this book yet, but I will soon.