“What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

This is the premise of Oscar Wilde’s compact novel The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Parenting has always been difficult. Yet in the last few years, as a Christian, attempting to guide my children toward holiness has become increasingly more difficult. My children are inundated daily with lies about who they are and their place in this world.

It was in the midst of this frustration that I found Sally Read’s Annunciation: A Call to Faith in a Broken World.

It has been a while since I read a collection of short stories as captivating as Fragile Objects by Katy Carl. 

In Mining the Bright Birds: Poems of Longing for Home, Jody L. Collins invites the reader into a moment, a minute of quotidian life, to witness. These poems reflect both in outward revelation of God’s glory in creation but also inward, the secret space within a heart attuned to His love.

Frank Mc Court’s childhood in Limerick, Ireland was so dire, reading his memoir, Angela’s Ashes, you’ll be grateful you ever had a full egg all to yourself.

The bleak stories seem to spill over one another with Mc Court’s run on sentences and dialogue meant to evoke the Irish cadence of speaking over one another (and not necessarily listening). This style of writing works well to convey desperate nature of the lives of the Mc Court’s but leaves very little in the way of respite.

“Perhaps someday we’ll recall with joy even these things”

These are Aeneas’s words in Virgil’s The Aeneid; spoken to encourage his men in the face of hardship. They are also the words of Lucille, the seventeen-year-old narrator of Josephine Humphreys’ novel Rich in Love, spoken to encourage herself. This is the story of the unravelling of the Odom family and the seventeen-year-old who tries to keep them together.