Book Review

I just finished reading a book that was a surprisingly good read. The book is Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner. I checked this book out expecting to skim through some parts, and ended up reading it from cover to cover. It was remarkably honest, and a bit like reading someone's diary, or even her blog.

The author was an Orthodox Jew before she became Christian. The book is organized by church seasons (Advent, Pentecost, etc), and she parallels most of these seasons with the Jewish traditions taking place at the same time. She also talks about her current struggles. While I don't necessarily agree with everything she says, it was very refreshing reading. Honestly, I'm struggling to remember another book that would be filed in the Christian or Religious section of Barnes and Noble that I have been able to relate to quite as well. Also, she partly credits becoming a Christian to the book At Home in Mitford, which has long been one of my favorite series to read. (She says she's "always felt faintly embarrassed about the role Jan Karon's Mitford novels played in my conversion." I, however, am not embarrassed - these books are always fun to read.)

If I started listing the insights she related that struck me, this would be a long post. The one that's freshest on my mind is this: She quotes a character from an old British novel as asking a Christian, "What I want to know is do you believe in it the way you believe in Australia?" An interesting thought, to be sure, but Winner points out that the Christian life is about a promise to believe even when we have trouble wrapping our heads around this huge thing called Christianity.