My Awesome God Bible Storybook

I get pretty excited about new bibles and the My Awesome God Bible Storybook from Discipleland is definitely awesome.  The illustrations are nice and colorful.  It includes a great index at the end so you can easily find stories associated with a theme you want to teach your little ones from like "Who God Is," "What God is Like," and "What God Does."  Each bible story is just a couple of pages and includes:

• Character Traits about God like "God is generous," ""God strengthens us," "God is awesome," and lots more.
• Big Ideas that explains how the Bible story reveals God's character.
• Questions that encourage kids to talk about bible truths.  My little guy is very excited to have his "own" bible.  He had a "baby" bible but he's taken it a step up with this one. 

One thing I noticed and loved right away about this bible is that it includes a lot of great stories you don't usually find in children's bibles.  For example, it tells about Gideon, Joash, Hezekiah, and Josiah, along with a lot of very important people who did awesome things for God.  This little kids bible actually inspired me to dig deeper into God's word and to write my latest devotional story, Jochebed's Baby.

The people who created My Awesome God Bible Storybook wrote it so that "your kids will delight in knowing more and more about the Lord of the universe."  That's pretty awesome!

The Inconvenient Marriage of Charlotte Beck

A fun read.  Delightful, engaging, charming, and yes, funny. 

That's how Miss Lauraine Snelling described another book by Kathleen Y'Barbo, and it definitely describes her most recent story The Inconvenient Marriage of Charlotte Beck.  This book captured my interest from the first when I read the beginning using Amazon's awesome look-inside feature.  I knew this was a book I'd like to read.  Besides being a good story, it's filled with historical quotes from Miss Pence, though I could not find out whether she was a real person or imagined.  "A lady should find a focal point on the opposite side of the room and walk toward it, head held high," Miss Pence advises. "If that focal point has a title and a hefty bank account, so much the better."  

The heroine of the story, Charlotte Beck, does end up landing a hefty bank account through her inconvenient marriage.  The bank account is her father's, though, and not her new husband's.  The marriage is, actually, convenient in that it allows Charlotte to fulfill her new dream of going to college and it save's the Alex's family from financial ruin. The marriage is only inconvenient in that the bride and groom don't love each other. 

In all honesty, I loved Alex Hambly right away!  He recalls to my mind Rhett Butler--dashing and handsome.  Unlike Rhett Butler, he is only mildly ungentlemanly at times and is, perhaps, what Rhett Butler would have been had he become a Christian.

Alex and Charlotte have an interesting relationship that is both coy and tense, and turns into something much more.  I loved reading a book that dealt with 1800s arranged marriage.  Honestly, so many marriages were arranged back then, you'd expect to find more fiction dealing with it.  Perhaps writers think that readers in our oh, so feminist culture won't go for that, but I loved reading a story that showed how a couple could marry without love and still learn to love one another.

Inconvenient?  Hm...

This book was provided by the wonderful people at Waterbrook Press in exchange for a thoughtful and honest review.