![]() ![]() And yes, I just googled Steve Deppe and discovered he now runs a successful wealth management business in San Diego. And yes, I cried after the 1994 breaststroke finals when the official said I lost even though technically I had a faster time. and then compete against your best friend in slide competitions, while grown-ups screamed at you to slide better, until your friend won and you cried, slides would seem a lot less awesome. ![]() ![]() But if you had to show up every day for slide practice at 7 A.M. For example, going down a slide is awesome. It always seemed like they were imposing structure and stress on something that should have been freeing and fun. “But even though I loved being in water, I never enjoyed swim meets. ![]()
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![]() When they receive a letter from Styles Court, the place where they solved their first murder together, it seems like fate and they readily accept. It was the last of her books to be published during her lifetime.Īfter a year apart Hercule Poirot, now crippled with arthritis, is reunited with his old companion Captain Hastings, who has since become a widower. ![]() Knowing that she could no longer write any novels, the elderly Christie authorised Curtain's removal from the vault and subsequent publication. The final Poirot novel that Christie wrote, Elephants Can Remember, was published in 1972, followed by Christie's last novel, Postern of Fate. Partly fearing for her own survival, and partly wanting to have a fitting end to Poirot's series of novels, Christie had the novel locked away in a bank vault for over thirty years. The novel also returns the characters to the setting of Christie's first published work, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.Ĭhristie wrote the novel in the early 1940s, during World War II. The novel features Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings (who had not appeared together since Dumb Witness in 1937) in their final appearances in Christie's works. Curtain: Poirot's Last Case is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in September 1975 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in the same year, probably also in September. ![]() ![]() ![]() To make matters worse, Avery’ just discovered a billing discrepancy for materials supposedly purchased for construction of the Lago de Cobre Dam.ĭesperate for answers, Avery contacts FBI Special Agent Marc Wilkins for help. until the day she finds him standing with a gun over the body of a dead man. Raised by Senator Elliott, Avery has never doubted her grandfather is the man of integrity and faith she’s always believed him to be …. On the family’s Brazos River Ranch in Texas, Avery Elliott helps run her grandfather’s commercial construction business. ![]() ![]() Categories: Christian Fiction / Mystery & Thrillersīestselling and award-winning author DiAnn Mills delivers a heart-stopping story of a faulty construction job, the discovery of a dead body, and a sinister plot. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And while there are some very good books within this category, there are also some amazing stories outside this white feathery room. The thing is, if you do a general Google search on books about angels, you are going to find a plethora of books…and most of them are written by white women, with a tendency to fall into the conservative Christian interpretation of angels. ![]() And don’t even get me started about the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who. When it comes to our reading material, there are endless requests for books about angels: angels of faith angels of forbidden love the battle of good and evil guardian angels fallen angels. Almost every religion/faith/mythology has some form of ‘angel’: a heavenly being that watches over us, delivers messages of purpose, and is supposed to protect us from the inevitable stupidity we inflict upon ourselves. ![]() ![]() He's decided to share some difficult news that he hasn't talked about publicly before. His publisher, Scholastic Canada, writes that he receives about 10,000 fan letters a year.Īn author like Munsch, a mainstay on bestseller lists since the 1970s, doesn't need to do press. But this year, as his latest books I Can Fix It!and Think Big! come out, he reached out to The Next Chapterfor an interview. His stories have been translated into 20 languages, including Anishinaabemowin, Arabic and Swedish. Since publishing his first story over 40 years ago, the Guelph, Ont., writer has sold more than 80 million copies of his books in North America alone. A mother rocks her baby to sleep every night and sweetly sings, "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always." A boy yells "Clang clang, rattle-bing-bang!" every night at the top of his lungs to protest bedtime.Īll of these classic tales - and nearly 100 others that line children's bookshelves around the world - come from the brilliant mind of Robert Munsch. ![]() ![]() A princess outsmarts a dragon, breaks up with her bum of a prince and skips off, barefoot and dirty, to make her own happy ending. ![]() ![]() ![]() But then, as Atwood has always said, everything she writes about is possible and much of it has already happened. As with The Handmaid’s Tale and the rise of the misogynist right in the US, the passing of time has made her work seem ever more eerily prophetic. The Year of the Flood is the middle book in Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, published between 20. ![]() The fragility of human endeavour and the terrifying consequences of our choices are the message to take from this devastating book. He grapples not only with human suffering and savagery on a baroque, almost unimaginable scale with faith, love and the blunt urge to survive but with the existential horror of the possible end of the human race. ![]() McCarthy writes in an unrelenting, declamatory prose somewhere between the Bible and late Beckett, stripped for the most part of the adornment of apostrophes and speech marks and the breathing space provided by commas. This is a hard book to read but also, as Andrew O’Hagan put it, “the first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation”. The father keeps a pistol by him, to kill his son and then himself when the time comes the mother committed suicide years before. Nine years on, if the man and boy meet other humans, they will almost certainly be raped and eaten. Survivors descended into “bloodcults”, savagery and cannibalism. In the first years after the catastrophe, the roads were crowded with refugees, foraging remaining food stocks. ![]() ![]() ![]() The biggest evil, Hawthorne claims, is the evil we create ourselves. The trials are not part of the stories, but they lurk just behind the trees in both Young Goodman Brown and Hawthorne’s more famous novel The Scarlet Letter. Even though the witch trials were more than 100 years before Nathaniel Hawthorne was born, it is as if the author tried to bleed out a multi-generation trauma through his pen. He died refusing to admit that condemning innocent people to die was a bad thing to do. His ancestor John Hathorne (Nathaniel Hawthorne added the W to the name) was a judge during those bloody days. ![]() Nathaniel Hawthorne himself was obsessed with the Salem Witch Trials of the late 1600s. Like many young men, religious or not, he has been socialized to battle the righteous battle, even when there is nothing there to fight. Young Goodman Brown is upstanding, publicly pious, and somewhat innocent for someone knee-deep in 1690s New England. He goes into the woods in search of good and evil. It is a tale about a Puritan who leaves his beautiful young wife for the night. Nevertheless, she taught Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “ Young Goodman Brown” for many years. This teacher worked at a religious school where even Shakespeare was censored. ![]() An English teacher I know could not show the musical Man of La Mancha because it had a prostitute in it. ![]() ![]() ![]() Brady only has his life experience to draw from, which means that he understands the basics of why he’s a conscript manning the height of human technology, which is both familiar as any contemporary military base and worth little in the face of the alien threat. On the speculative side, Henry employs a phenomenal bit of subtle worldbuilding through the partial perspective of a grunt with little formal education. However, Henry uses SF tropes to create a genuine connection between two unique characters, leading them on a journey that packs an enormous emotional punch. Military SF set in a vaguely dystopic future existing under the threat of imminent destruction isn’t new. ![]() ![]() Not in a mean way, but in the way science fiction fans tend to assume that they’ve already seen it all. Seriously, the spouse and I laughed at the back-cover description. Me, at about 90% through this book: Don’t mind me, I’m just sobbing my eyes out over these two precious men and their tragic circumstances. Me, before reading this book: I’m sure this will be a fun science fiction romance with some alien tech shenanigans! ![]() ![]() ![]() If God is present with us, why is there so little joy, power, energy, and peace in our lives? Yet many people – Christians included – find their lives fall short of the kind Jesus promised and proclaimed. ![]() ![]() Why is Spiritual Formation Important?Ĭloseness with God brings us true freedom and fullness (Jn. As we take on the life of Jesus – become like him – we experience a richness in life and faith that is truly renewed day by day (Col. We at Renovaré believe that such abundant life is possible here and now because Jesus showed us the way to it. Jesus said, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (Jn. We are not bystanders in our spiritual lives, we are active participants with God, who is ever inviting us into relationship with him. Spiritual Formation is a process, but it is also a journey through which we open our hearts to a deeper connection with God. That’s what Spiritual Formation is all about. ![]() And yet we rarely spend time developing our inner life. Our spirit is the most important part of who we are. There is an immaterial center in us that shapes the way we see the world and ourselves, directs the choices we make, and guides our actions. We have physical bodies, but our lives are largely driven by an unseen part of us. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() and the human consequences of a life without dreams.Ī bracing page-turner. It’s smart, high-tech noir.Ī tale of insidious, corporate-capitalist implications. Manibo neatly dissects the drawbacks of capitalist demands on society in this taut near-future procedural. But he soon faces the most dangerous decision of all, as he uncovers a terrifying truth about Sleeplessness that imperils him-and all of humanity. When his boss Simon dies in a suicidal overdose, Jamie doesn’t buy this too-convenient explanation-especially given its suspicious timing during a controversial merger-and investigates.Īs Jamie delves deeper into Simon’s final days, he tangles with extremist organizations and powerful corporate interests, and must confront past traumas and the unforeseen consequences of being Sleepless. ![]() Jamie Vega, a journalist at C+P Media, is one of the Sleepless. The outbreak creates a new class of people who are both feared and ostracized, most of whom optimize their extra hours to earn more money. In a near-future New York City where a minority of the population has lost the need for sleep, a journalist fights to uncover the truth behind his boss’s murder on the eve of a sinister corporate takeover-while his own Sleeplessness spirals out of control.Ī mysterious pandemic causes a quarter of the world to permanently lose the ability to sleep-without any apparent health implications. ![]() |