Well, you may notice that I did not return the next week for the last installment of my short reviews. Nor the next month. It is now more than eight months later!

Shortly after the last post, I was busy with a family crisis, then “snowvid” hit — record low temperatures here in Texas — which caused a pipe to burst and flood our apartment and ruin many of our belongings. We had to wait a month for repairs, during which time we lived in airbnbs or with various family members. All this was much, much too stressful to facilitate any blogging or much of anything other than just surviving life with two kids and one on the way.

Once we were finally well settled in, we were into the third trimester of my pregnancy and getting ready for baby and my computer was acting up so badly it was hard to use it for much. In early June, Lily Grace Fay was born, and so of course she has kept me pretty busy since. But recently I got a new computer, baby is starting to settle down into a nap schedule, and I am writing again. I have a few pieces of news to share with you and I’ll be posting about those over the next few weeks. But in the meantime — I try to always finish what I start, and so here are my final six 2020 book reviews!

My mom had this one on her Audible account, so after loving Big Little Lies so much, I decided to give this one a try. Honestly, I went back and forth wildly over the course of the book on whether I liked it or hated it. I found it somewhat hard to read, honestly — the premise is that a woman wakes up after an accident and has lost 10 years of her life. She doesn’t know her children at all. She doesn’t remember that she and her husband are separated. She feels like her 29-year-old self rather than her true 39-year-old self. And so I couldn’t help imagining if that happened to me and I forgot my husband and children, and that was an awful thought.

It was a very interesting idea, and overall I decided I liked where Moriarty went with it, though I didn’t care for some of the twists along the way. The hard part about reading her books is the completely godless worldview, but she has such a good grasp of human emotion and thought and perception and she is such a talented writer, I’m sure I’ll try to read more of her work.

The final book in my husband’s favorite series. I’m really glad I finally got around to reading these, and this third one was my personal favorite. The writing style was a little more personable, I think, and the plot was a bit tighter and more concise. The other two, particularly the first one, seemed to try to cover way too many topics, while this one followed its theme more closely.

It’s an old-fashioned mystery with a snarky, somewhat jaded detective with glimpses of Heaven and solid doses of theology and politics thrown in. What’s not to like?

I know Douglas Wilson is a controversial figure, and I don’t follow him closely. This is actually the only book I’ve read by him so far, so this is the only work of his I can vouch for. And it’s a good one. He delves into what the Bible defines as wealth, what our tools are for godly productivity, and the right way to steward these things. It’s a short, easy read, but a very good one!

I have yet to really like a Harlan Coben book very much, but my mom has some on her Audible account and I was looking for something to listen to in the middle of the night with pregnancy insomnia. For this purpose, I needed something I wouldn’t care that much about so I wouldn’t mind falling asleep with it on (and then having to go back and hunt for the last thing I heard later). This book fit the bill.

Like other Coben books I’ve read, it was okay. It drew me in, yes, and kept my interest. He really is good at suspense. But once again, I got to the end and just had a “meh” feeling. I always feel like the end of his books kind of undermines the entire rest of the book, and not in a good way. It just kind of left me unsatisfied. But it served its purpose and kept me occupied during the night hours until I could fall back asleep!

Christmas With the Kranks, the movie based on this book, is one of my absolute favorite Christmas movies. I watch it every year. So I thought that, with a little time left in the year, it would be a great opportunity to finally read the book.

This is one of those rare times I feel like the movie is much better. The book was okay, but I felt like it was much less funny and the characters were less charming. It was honestly kind of annoying and mostly forgettable, though it still hit the highlights. But this year I’m just going to stick to the film!

I reached the end of my list and realized — I read 61 books last year, but somehow I’ve only reviewed 60! So I scoured my Goodreads list to see what I missed, and I found I missed a very important one that I actually read back much earlier in the year!

It’s appropriate to finish out my reviews with this one actually. It’s not my favorite Narnia book, exactly, but it has one of my favorite passages in all of fiction, and the depth of meaning in it is hard to surpass. Seeing the last days of Narnia, and mirrored in it, the last days to come of our own world, is emotional and powerful. Seeing the characters stand against the lies and half-truths all around them is inspiring. But perhaps greatest of all is the glimpse we get of Heaven, which gives me a longing for that place that is unequaled by any other writing.

So to wrap up these reviews, I’ll share the passage I love so much — and bring the 2020 reviews to an end.

“And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”