Tag: teen (page 1 of 2)

January 13, 2023 / 0 Comments

Emily of Deep Valley

Firstly: you may have noticed the blog looking spiffier, perhaps? For some reason, the week after Christmas consistently inspires me to give this site a makeover. It always seems so fun at first, like a project I’ll start and finish between rounds of Nertz with my girls, but then I end up deep in the weeds, reformatting the titles for every single post I’ve written over the past almost-decade, and I invariably think to myself, around page 67 of 96, I’ve made a huge mistake.

But when I’m done, I’m always glad I did it: with every redesign of this site, I try to make it tidier, easier for you to use, and (of course) prettier. This time, I’ve actually resurrected and updated an old design—one whose simplicity and clean white margins made it one of my favorites. If you find any broken links or if there was something from the previous design you miss, please let me know! You are ultimately the reason I tinker with this site at all—I want it to be a pleasure to comb through as you look for good books. So please do reach out in the comments or via email and let me if there’s anything I can do to make it so.

And now . . . today’s book! A beauty!

When I finally picked up Mitali Perkins’s lauded Steeped in Stories, I was delighted to find that six of the seven children’s books she lists as her favorites were my favorites, too. But best of all, the seventh—Emily of Deep Valley—was a book so brand new to me that I’d never even heard of it. I’d read the first few Betsy-Tacy books when my girls were very small, but apart from that, I knew nothing about Maud Hart Lovelace’s work. And I’d certainly never read Emily of Deep Valley.

That, my friends, has been remedied—and swiftly!

Perhaps it’s too simplistic to refer to Maud Hart Lovelace as a “Minnesotan L.M. Montgomery,” but that’s the most concise way I can think of to send all you Anne of Green Gables fans out in search of this book immediately. I’ll start there: if you love L.M. Montgomery’s books, look up Maud Hart Lovelace post haste!

She’s best known for her Betsy-Tacy books, but what I didn’t realize is that the Betsy-Tacy series, much like Montgomery’s Anne series, follows its characters into adulthood. Emily of Deep Valley is the stand-alone story of Emily Webster, a girl just graduating high school a few years after Betsy and Tacy. She feels on the outside of her friends, who are all heading off to college while Emily stays home to care for her grandfather.

This is a story rich in themes of sacrifice and love, one that challenges readers to stop looking over the fence at the next green field and start cultivating the soil they’re standing in. Emily keenly feels the boundaries placed about her, and yet she learns to flourish there—ultimately getting to know and care for a community of Syrian refugees that many in her town have overlooked.

Emily of Deep Valley is a sweet story, yes, but its roots go deep: Lovelace asks meaningful questions about race and relationships (Emily’s first love interest is most emphatically Not a Keeper) and true friendship. And it’s one that will send readers—in our house, at least—into the rest of Lovelace’s books, eager to read them all.

Emily of Deep Valley
Maud Hart Lovelace (1950)

November 18, 2022 / 0 Comments

5 Lovely Collections of Prayers

I came to faith in a church that emphasized personal experience, where prayer was something instinctive—the more free-form, the better. And there’s something beautiful and true about that. But when I first encountered written prayers, I was struck by how quickly they transformed my own prayers by giving me words for those feelings I couldn’t name or that, when joy or grief submerged me, I couldn’t articulate.

As my daughters grow and we look for ways to help them deepen and mature in their own faith, I find myself reaching for written prayers—not because they teach us The Only Way to Pray, but because they connect us to the Christians who came before us, those who wrote their verses on papyrus or in ink dipped from a pot nearby. These old prayers remind us that the psalmists and writers of long ago wrestled with doubts and praised the Lord with emotions still recognizable to us.

But there are new prayers being written today, too—in a coffee shop, maybe, with a phone buzzing nearby, or on a park bench, as the writer looked out over the water. The means and the language differ, but the things the writers wrestled with rarely change. The conviction of sin; the delight of grace; the blank absence of doubt; the joy of deliverance—all are familiar to us, from the time King David penned his psalms to today.

I love how these collections of prayers set our aim a little higher than we might think to reach on to our own. They draw us out of our own particular worries (though God loves to hear about them, too) and remind us just who it is we’re talking to: the God of all things, the maker of the universe. The God who tends to needs both big and small.

And so, I love a good collection of prayers, whether old or new. Here are a few favorites we’ve gathered over the years that have blessed our family with words when we struggled to find our own and that have inspired us to praise the Lord from the heights as well as the depths.

The Valley of Vision, ed. by Arthur Bennett

This classic book of Puritan prayers was my first introduction to written prayers. These are beautiful, theologically rich prayers that model a deep, stirring, challenging faith, and they cover everything from confessing sin to praising the Lord to preparing for the Sabbath.

Every Moment Holy, by Douglas Kaine McKelvey

These books (both Volumes 1 and 2) encourage us to meet every trial and celebration by drawing near to God. Though they’re meant to be read corporately as liturgies, these work well as private prayers too. I love how specific these prayers are: some deal with small concerns and others (especially in Volume 2) deal with some of the deepest griefs we can face. (Read the full review.)

Into His Presence, by Tim Chester

Into His Presence reads like an updated, more accessible version of Valley of Vision, with prayers drawn from the Puritans and lightly edited so they read a little more like contemporary works. Each chapter deals with a different circumstance (“Prayers of Gratitude,” “Prayers for the Lost,” etc.) and reminds us that the Lord meets us in every season.

Sheltering Mercy, by Ryan Whitaker Smith & Dan Wilt

Sheltering Mercy is a collection of responsive poems written in the wake of Psalms 1-75. These read beautifully as prayers and show us that Scripture is something we can engage with: we can read it, pray it, and write poems by its light. (Read the full review.)

And one late addition, discovered after I photographed the other books. But I just couldn’t leave it off this list!

Jesus Listens: 365 Prayers for Kids, by Sarah Young

Our family is reading Jesus Listens right now and it’s an unexpected pleasure. This collection of prayers includes one for each day of the year, each accompanied by a few verses that connect the prayers to Scripture. The language in this book is so warm and inviting, it deserves (and shall receive!) a full review, but I couldn’t bear to pass over it here.

October 14, 2022 / 0 Comments

My Tech-Wise Life

We jokingly called this past summer The Summer of Life-Skills. It was a make-up summer, one in which I determined to teach my kids a bazillion things they might need to know as adults—practical lessons, like How to Ride the City Bus, or How to Order Your Own Italian Soda. For much of the pandemic, my daughters were able to attend their small school in person, and I’m grateful for that. But even so, we continue to find little residual burdens the pandemic has laid upon our daughters. So many things were closed for so long that our girls hardly remembered how to navigate them, and with my husband working from home, it just wasn’t necessary for me to bring them along with me on errands like grocery shopping or each other’s dental appointments. We were all a little rusty when it came to interacting with the world.

Thus, Our Summer of Life Skills. We invented tasks that would send the older girls to the grocery store alone because we, I don’t know, urgently needed a half-dozen doughnuts. We rode the bus downtown throughout the summer, much to the amusement of our route’s regular driver. Imagine: me and four girls, from fourteen to six, filing on board and filling the back seats. The older girls took summer jobs babysitting and cracking eggs at our favorite bakery.

It was a crash course in Being Out in the World and Talking to Adults Who Are Not Your Parents or Teachers. In June, the girls were nervous about it. By August, they were talking to the librarian like it was no big deal and ordering their own ice cream cones. Success!

But now, our next phase of Life Skills is upon us. Our oldest daughter wants to know: when can she have her own phone? And our answer has always been, “Way after you think you should.” But good gravy, now she’s in high school and her best friend has moved across the country and we’ve discovered internet-free phones, so we’ve been thinking about it. Slowly, but we’re thinking about it.

And in the spirit of that, I picked up Amy Crouch’s My Tech-Wise Life, which, like her father’s book The Tech-Wise Family, is brilliant. Full of helpful research and thoughtful insights, My Tech-Wise Life is written by a young adult for young adults. After all, her generation’s experience with technology is profoundly different than that of their parents: we old-timers remember a time before the internet, but many of our children have been on the internet since back when they were the adorable, dimply stars of their parents’ Facebook accounts.

And so Amy Crouch brings a valuable voice to the conversation about technology. She brings the perspective of her family, and the way they approached technology, as well as her own experience growing up with it. Each chapter ends with a letter from her dad, Andy Crouch, written to her. These letters are insightful, moving, and full of grace. Between the two of them, they provide a comprehensive, practical way of viewing and using technology—which is, I think, one of the toughest life skills to learn these days.

So, will we get our daughter a phone soon? That’s still under discussion. But when we do, we plan to give her a copy of this book along with it.

Worth noting: This book includes a chapter on pornography, as it should. While not graphic, it does discuss the subject at length and in depth, so I’d encourage you to pre-read at least that chapter before handing this book to your teen. But really, the whole book is a great read for parents as well as teens.

My Tech-Wise Life: Growing Up and Making Choices in a World of Devices
Amy Crouch & Andy Crouch (2020)

April 29, 2022 / 0 Comments

Sheltering Mercy

The Book of Psalms, perhaps more than any other biblical book, has a way of striking us right at our center. All of Scripture has this effect, to some degree. But for all their curious imagery, the psalms are written in language we understand: the emotion in them is raw, sometimes unexpected, and always deeply true. Reading them we are struck by verses that makes us think, “Yes, that’s exactly how it is.”

Not every verse strikes us that way, of course. Some strike us like stones. They knock our feet out from beneath us as we jog merrily along. But there’s something about the first-person perspective of the psalms, about their vulnerability and openness, that gives us words to say to God when we find ourselves stumbling.

Sheltering Mercy is a collection of poetic responses to the first seventy-five psalms: each one borrows language from the psalms and from the rest of Scripture in order to, as the authors write in the introduction, “harmonize” with the original psalm. These are not close paraphrases or neat translations, but responsive poems rooted deeply in the language of Scripture.

And these poems are beautifully written—I love that about them. But I also love how they model for us, and for our families, a particular way of interacting with Scripture. The poems in Sheltering Mercy show us what it looks like to sit with a psalm, to consider its connections to the rest of Scripture, and to respond to God through beautiful language. This book is beautiful both for what it is—a gorgeous collection of Scripture-rich prayers—and for the attention and care for Scripture it displays. It reminds us that the psalms are worth lingering over and invites us to listen closely—to say with the psalmist, and with the authors of Sheltering Mercy, “Yes, that’s exactly how it is.”

Sheltering Mercy: Prayers Inspired By the Psalms
Ryan Whitaker Smith & Dan Wilt (2022)

Disclosure: I did receive a copy of this book for review, but I was not obligated to review it or compensated for my review in any way. I share this book with you because I love it, not because I was paid to do so.

January 28, 2022 / 0 Comments

The Sinking City

Liona Caravatti’s family belongs to one of the highest ranks in the city of Venice. Her life is comfortable, filled with little delicacies, affectionate siblings, and splendor. The one note in it that sounds off is her relationship to her father, which, though she doesn’t understand why, is different than his relationship with her siblings. While he dotes on them, his eyes slide past her, leaving her free in some ways to grow up as she pleases, but giving her nonetheless an ache that she cannot place.

Venice is a city of the sea—a city threaded through with canals, where the water is never far from the front doors of its citizens. It is beautiful, but the one note in it that sounds off is that of the Seleni, an ancient race of water-dwellers who retrieve pearls for the wealthy Venetians in exchange for a home in Venice’s waters. But the Seleni’s brine-like smell precedes them whenever they come on land, and the bargains they make with those wealthy citizens always come at a high cost.

When the Seleni intersect with Liona’s family, the city itself begins to crumble.

The Sinking City is a beautifully written story that weaves fantastic elements into the solid structures of a real city. Venice seems a plausible place in which to find magicians and wrathful sea monsters, and Liona surprises herself as well as readers as she navigates the city, trying to save it, her own life, and that of her family. The story is enjoyable and unpredictable, and Cohen’s ability to craft complex, believable characters is stunning: even the city of Venice feels like a character in the story—one with desires and personality. Her descriptions of the courtyards, canals, and alleyways of Venice make it feel as though her version of the city extends beyond the story; one gets the sense that just beyond the courtyard she’s describing, there are several more worth exploring.

There are some grim moments in The Sinking City, and for that reason I don’t think I’d recommend it for younger teens. But those moments are purposeful and they’re handled well—they suit the story and serve to show how high the stakes are for the characters. Just as Cohen’s Venice is undergirded with spells, The Sinking City is undergirded with themes of humility and sacrifice that play out in beautiful, nuanced ways. If the book has a fault at all, it might be in the ending, which places too neat a bow on a story that is otherwise rich and multi-layered. But I don’t hold that against it: this is a book I look forward to sharing with my daughters, and one I can’t wait to re-read.

The Sinking City
Christine Cohen (2021)

Tag: teen (page 1 of 2)

Emily of Deep Valley

5 Lovely Collections of Prayers

The Valley of Vision, ed. by Arthur Bennett

Every Moment Holy, by Douglas Kaine McKelvey

Into His Presence, by Tim Chester

Sheltering Mercy, by Ryan Whitaker Smith & Dan Wilt

Jesus Listens: 365 Prayers for Kids, by Sarah Young

My Tech-Wise Life

Sheltering Mercy

The Sinking City

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