A Love Surrendered: Christian book review

    Orphaned in Iowa, Annie Kennedy moves to Boston to stay with her spinster aunt. She longs for romance to fill the void left by her parents' death. But when she falls hard for Steven O'Connor, the man who broke an engagement to her sister, Annie is worried. Will he break her heart, too, when he discovers who she really is?

Julie Lessman is an award-winning author whose tagline of “Passion With a Purpose” underscores her intense passion for both God and romance. She is the recipient of 14 Romance Writers of America awards and was chosen as the #1 Romance Fiction Author of the Year in the Family Fiction magazine 2012 and 2011 Readers Choice Awards.  Julie was also awarded #1 Historical Fiction Author of the Year in that same poll and #3 Author of the Year, #4 Novel of the Year and #3 Series of the year. She resides in Missouri with her husband, daughter, son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter and is the author of “The Daughters of Boston” series--A Passion Most Pure, A Passion Redeemed, and A Passion Denied. Book 1 in her “Winds of Change” series A Hope Undaunted ranked #5 on Booklist’s Top 10 Inspirational Fiction for 2010.

 The author, Julie Lessman

Joy In Our Journey's review of A Love Surrendered

    A Love Surrendered is a complicated story with many characters, each one with their own story; it takes place in 1932.  The main character, Annie, is the almost 18-year-old child, now orphaned, of a pastor and his wife who raised her to be a “good girl” in a very small rural town in Iowa.  She has an older sister, Maggie, whom she greatly admires and wants to emulate, but Maggie has more or less disappeared from her life, having moved first to Boston and then to California.  But Maggie’s experiences have intrigued Annie, and she desires nothing more than to see the sights and to experience the excitement that Maggie wrote of in letters to Annie over the past several years - experiences which deal with situations and people the like of which Annie has never experienced before and wants very much to try out in her “new life” now living in Boston.  She and her baby sister, Glory, have come to live with their Aunt Eleanor, a spinster, a seemingly strict and unfeeling woman who seems much older and old-fashioned. 

    In her adventures in her new life, Annie becomes part of a very “fast” crowd and soon meets a man, Steven, to whom she becomes quickly attracted---and then realizes he is the very man her sister, Maggie, wrote often about in past years and was very much in love with; they had broken up when Maggie moved to California.  Annie is protected a number of times by Steven (a Federal Prohibition Officer), who rescues her from various potentially serious situations, until she finally comes to her senses, with the help of a new friend, Faith, and decides to live her life the way God would have her live it.  It turns out that Faith is Steven’s sister!

    **This story is filled with many descriptions of lustful behavior on the parts of both married and unmarried couples, and great emotional detail of what happens when lust becomes uncontrollable in people’s lives.  Annie is torn but in love, and it is difficult for her to control her emotions.  Steven is nearly uncontrollable.

    This story opens up people’s lives to reveal some of their very real problems, both in marriage and out, and is a lesson on learning to live and behave in God’s way and with His direction.  It is a story of learning how to forgive past mistakes and how to allow God’s leading to direct every avenue of one’s life.

    Annie “accidently” becomes involved with Steven’s family, a large family of sisters and brothers and parents and grandchildren, who are close and often together, and mostly who adhere to Biblical principles.  She learns from them and comes to love them quickly as they are the family she longs for.  She and Steven have a difficult relationship, due to their different personalities and levels of commitment to God’s teachings, and also, their history of him having been involved with her older sister.  This is a very complicated but intriguing story.  A mystery almost to the very end!

**While in today's day and age, this romance book would seem harmless in many's eyes, two of us who read A Love Surrendered felt it went far beyond what a Christian has the freedom to be reading for entertainment.  There were many instances of lustful situations, some described more than they should be.  This isn't a book I'd want my 15-year-old daughter to read - and yet, there were many biblical, godly messages woven in this book.  However, we can learn those godly messages without reading sensual material.

    I purpose as a Christian woman to read books that enhance my spiritual walk with the Lord, not books that cause me to compromise my faith because of what I read and imagine.  A touch of romance is understandable in books, but lengthy, descriptive passages can easily get out of hand and become arousing to the reader.  I prefer to read books that are not sensual like this, so I'm sorry to say that I cannot recommend this book for the Christian reader or for the teen of a parent whose goal is to raise children that are innocent without being naive.

Julieanne
Joy In Our Journey.com

A Love Surrendered is available October 2012 at your favorite bookseller - from Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group.

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