Sunday, October 14, 2012

Interrupted by Rachel Coker

Interrupted by Rachel Coker is a book about growing up. It is 1939 and Alcyone Everly is a girl ready to turn 14 tomorrow.  Her friend Sam Carroll is steady and stands beside her no matter what but he is always so friendly no matter what and it bugs her.  Alcyone, Ally to her friends, has a hard life.  Her mother is different from most people for goodness sake she named Alcyone after a star.  Now she is forgetting things and sees things that aren’t there and she is so tired now sleeping all the time.  Last year the Dr Murphy diagnosed brain cancer but her mother refused to seek treatment.  Ally has been taking care of her mother for quite a while now and Ally is so afraid that she will die.  Her mother is all that she has since her father left the family 6 years ago.  Then the unspeakable happens—her mother dies.  Right after the funeral the social worker the social worker allows Ally to pack a few things and states that the rest is to be sold to pay for the funeral even her beloved piano.  Ally is taken to live in Maine with Beatrice Lovell who wants to adopt her and become her mother.  Ally refuses to let anyone in to be close except Charlotte (Charlie to her friends) and Irene her new sister.  Beatrice never gives up and continues to pray for her and love her and try to accept Ally’s rejection of her.  Can Ally grow to reach out and let others and God into her life?  How can she deal with the men, boys really, going off to war, maybe never to return?  This is her story and how she faces life.
I liked this story.  Ally has many of the same qualities and problems that many girls face growing up no matter the times.  In that respect this book is timeless.  Ally also has the problems of loving people and knowing that they may leave her—some through death, some through walking away—and she must learn to love and trust anyway.  It is a story of growing up in uncertain times.  In this particular story is during times of the loss of a parent and wartime but all of history has its uncertainty and as humans we must as we grow learn to love and trust or we become people who never know the joys that God means for us to have in this life.  This book can be read and enjoyed by all but it feels made most especially for women of the ages of high school and older though can safely be read but though much younger.
This book was provided for this review by Zondervan.

No comments:

Post a Comment