Arena, by Karen Hancock

My new favorite author, Karen Hancock, could use some prayer support. Here is Karen Hancock's blog, where she says profound things about life and writing.

In the past year she broke her ankle and then a month later her wrist and arm (really badly), and then she got carpal tunnel syndrome and then tendonitis in her hands, and a sore shoulder. These are not good things for being able to write.

Please pray she heals up quickly from everything and can be restored to full writing capacity. She's in the middle of writing a new novel (science fiction I think; at the moment it's called Black Box, but won't be out until 2009, so who knows what it'll be called by then).

Our whole family really loved her 4-book series, The Legends of the Guardian-King (or at least my husband and I did, and the kids didn't stop reading until they finished all four, so they must have appreciated something about them, even if a lot of it went over their heads) -- and then yesterday I finished reading her first novel, Arena. Since it was her first published work, it was less polished than the series that followed, but after some suspension of disbelief at the beginning, I definitely got hooked and sucked into the story, and had to read to the last page to see how it all turned out. Brilliant analogies, excellent reminders of things we really need to keep in mind as we trek through this life, lots of action, quite a bit of romance, sobering thoughts, good role models who aren't perfect but try hard and are interesting...quite a lot of mature themes, not for young kids, requires parental reading first to determine appropriate age/maturity-level to give this to. Again, I think the Guardian-King series was better written (not surprising as the author progressed in her craft), and I wasn't sure about the premise of Arena at the beginning, but I ended up really liking it. I really liked the characters. David can testify that I was exhausted and spent by the end of the book - it was a real saga, a long and arduous journey, but one which I didn't want to stop, and which encouraged me to trust God.

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I also recently really enjoyed Unveiled by Francine Rivers (my first dabble into her books, thanks to the recommendation of my friend Mary Jones). Jason gave it to me for Christmas. Emily read that one after I did, and then went ahead of me to zip through two more in this "Lineage of Grace" series, which were given me by my brother Paul & his wife, Unashamed (about Rahab) and Unspoken (about Bathsheba) - they are short novellas. Now she's hoping she gets the remaining two in the series for her birthday in a couple of months (Unafraid, and Unshaken, about Mary and Ruth). These are the five women specifically mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus. That makes them pretty special, amongst the sea of men listed. And indeed they did have pretty remarkable and tough lives, for various reasons!

After I catch up with Emily in this series, I have my sights on trying a Kathy Tyers sci fi novel: the Firebird Trilogy. Any of you read it already?