My Favorite Book of January 2022

Amanda Dykes knocked it out of the park with Whose Waves These Are. The story is so beautiful it changed me. It inspired me. It made me weep. Her book made me feel warm inside and her words were medicine for my weary soul. I could feel God in them. And her writing is gorgeous; lyrical and sweeping. I like to highlight passages when I read for later reflection, but if I did that with this book, my eBook would have been more yellow than not. Don’t even get me started on her characterization. I fell in love with the people and their way of life. I envied their sense of quiet contentment. If you enjoy Christian fiction, you’ll want to read this one! 5 stars.

I met Amanda years ago at a writer’s retreat. She is a real sweetheart and I’m thrilled she has found her literary voice. Her debut novel, Whose Waves These Are, is the winner of the prestigious 2020 Christy Award Book of the Year, a Booklist 2019 Top Ten Romance debut, and the winner of an INSPY award. That is big time!

“He would never forget the impression of that voice on his heart. It was the voice of the man, who, king of the universe, stooped to wash his own disciples’ earth crusted feet. Who rubbed spit into dirt and used the mud to make a blind man see. Whose royal day of birth was enrobed in dust, right there with the animals in a barn. That man was accustomed to doing great things in humble places, and it usually involved dirt. or rocks, as it were. The same God who told a solitary man to build a boat to prepare for a flood when no one had so much as seen a drop of water fall from the sky in all their lives.”  ― Amanda Dykes, Whose Waves These Are

Here’s the synopsis:

In the wake of WWII, a grieving fisherman submits a poem to a local newspaper asking readers to send rocks in honor of loved ones to create something life-giving—but the building halts when tragedy strikes. Decades later, Annie returns to the coastal Maine town when she learns her great-uncle Robert, the man who became her refuge during the hardest summer of her youth, is now the one in need of help. What she didn’t expect was finding a wall of heavy boxes hiding in his home. Long-ago memories of stone ruins on a nearby island trigger her curiosity, igniting a fire in her anthropologist soul to uncover answers.

Publication Date: April 2019
Genre: Christian historical fiction
Read-alikes: Thief of Glory by Sigmund Brouwer, The Lost Castle by Kristy Cambron, The Sea Before Us by Sarah Sundin

 

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