Review - Shadowlands

Shadowlands by Leonore Fleischer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To tell you the truth, I didn't expect much from a book that is a novel "based on the screenplay by William Nicholson based on his stage play." However, I was pleasantly surprised by the . . . joy of reading it! A few editing issues--a repeated paragraph here and there, etc. Other than that, however, the writing was smooth and vivid.

This book is based on the true story of C.S. Lewis' romance and marriage with Joy Davidman Gresham. Lewis, in his fifties and settled into the life of a university teacher and bachelor, thought that he knew what love was--until he realized, thanks to Joy, that he had been putting up walls to keep his feelings in and people out ever since his mother died when he was nine years old. Through his marriage to Joy, C.S. Lewis came alive again and was finally able to understand the wonder and the suffering that he had been lecturing about for so long.

Lewis' story resonated with me, as I have also been through a lot of pain in my life and a lot of effort to protect myself from it. Person by person and book by book, I catch glimpses of freedom through the holes in my own walls, making joyful connections to the other side. For, as the father of one of Lewis' students is reported in this story to have said, "We read to know that we're not alone."


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Review - Rilla of Ingleside

Rilla of Ingleside (Anne of Green Gables No. 8) by L.M. Montgomery

rating: 5 of 5 stars

The final book in the Anne of Green Gables series makes a solemn capstone to an amazing run. My Dad bought me these books when I was little on the condition that I read all of them, and I've just now fulfilled that promise.

Covering the duration of World War One, this book, along with Anne's House of Dreams, is definitely one of the saddest in the series. Yet these two books give the characters of Anne and her children, including the title character, her youngest daughter Rilla, a more rounded feel.

The story left me with a sense that the soul can bear a lot more suffering than any of us usually think it can. There is something terrible in that, since the last thing any of us want to experience is more suffering, but also something hopeful, since it helps us to understand that we can live through it and have a sense of happiness again. Maybe not the same unburdened happiness that we used to have--but happiness nonetheless.

Although the book dragged in parts (as I'm sure real life did in those times as people waited desperately for word of their loved ones at the western front), any book that so unapologetically forces me to read it in two days and makes me cry deserves five stars.

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