Gracie and the Preacher is available through the
following book sellers:
Amazon UK
Apple
Barnes & Noble
Smashwords
Kobo
Five
Stars *****
One of
the things I love about Tom Peters’ writing is his ability to grab your
interest right off the bat and make you smile.
Gracie
and The Preacher opens with:
“Star
and I got back just as Mom and her new boyfriend Pete were starting to roll
around on the living room floor grappling and laughing. She’d met Pete at the
gym where she went looking for all her boyfriends lately. Mom could bench press
over 280 pounds on a good day. Of course, her arms were short and that helped
her some.”
Peters
is so comfortable when he writes his stories in this voice. We have seen it
before in The Boy Who Delivered The Wind http://tinyurl.com/d27qg8r and An
Imperfect Miracle http://tinyurl.com/ck2extq
: a young boy from the back hills, telling the tale through innocent eyes, his
quirky world colouring the scene, his naïveté describing adult situations with
humorous perplexity.
There
are a lot of outright belly laughs and tongue-in-cheek smiles tucked into this
little gem for the reader.
Brent is
a rough and tumble, somewhat street savvy kid, protective of his dog, Star—a
ninety-five pound Rottweiler, who is on probation for aggressive behaviour.
Their home situation is iffy at best and so one day Brent runs away and ends up
hooking up with a revival preacher.
Their
journey together with Star—who becomes Gracie to hide his identity—is a story
about running away from poverty and lack, and a seemingly uncaring mother, and
seeking a new life, family and sense of belonging. Along the way, Brent and Co.
travel all across North America, into South America, are involved in illegal
smuggling activities, constantly change their identities, preach healing and
finding God, and grow to love one another until they are more family than blood
could ever make them.
The
Preacher is a combination of Robin Hood, Kenneth Copeland and a petty crook. He
has a heart of gold and seems to know every back alley and hiding place in the
U.S., Mexico and further south. His experience with the unsavory world and his
occasional run-ins with the law, keep this tale fast-paced, fun and really hard
to put down.
I highly
recommend the story. It’s Five Star ***** all the way.
An Imperfect Miracle is available through the
following online book sellers:
Barnes & Noble
Apple
Kobo
Untreed Reads Store
Jeffrey Miller, The Curt Jester Blog
“When you get a book to review there is always a bit of a
hesitancy. What goes through your mind is "What if it is really bad."
Well I have dodged that bullet this time as this new book An Imperfect Miracle
is quite enjoyable.
The story takes on the subject of all those sightings of images of the Virgin Mary. There have certainly been a rash of them that apparently are quite ridiculous and so the media has paid them some attention mostly as a subject of ridicule. Miraculous images are nothing new in the Church and of course there are some very good examples of very plausible ones such as Our Lady of Guadalupe. This interest provides the subtext of the plot.
The story centers around a young boy Nathan Gray from a broken family who lives with his mother. A rather intelligent child with a large imagination that on the surface seems to be an escape from the past of an abusive father. His dog Chewy might be man's best friend, but he is an imaginative man's best friend on the order of Harvey. One day this young man sees something that defies explanation and is on the order of the miraculous and then he soon discovers an image of Mary on a cement wall that seems more than just a random water stain.
The story is told through his eyes as he discovers more about Mary and the people involved in promoting what was becoming a new shrine. He has intellectual curiosity and even though he and his mother belong to a local Protestant Church he does not see anything incongruent with what he is learning. He also develops a friendship with one of the people in the local Catholic church in his small town along with the Catholic priest and also one of the pastors of the church he attends.
The novel involves the tensions of this boy with an active imagination reporting this miraculous image and then the coming crowds to see this image and the towns involvement in seeing this as an opportunity to bring more money into the coffers as the image is on public land. Further plot elements introduce some danger and further mysteries on a more material level.
I really enjoyed the telling of the story and the boy's reactions to the multiple events that developed. There were a couple of plot points that seemed to be of a more implausible nature, but they didn't ruin the story for me. This book is also not written as a novel disguised as Catholic apologetics and can easily be recommended to a wide audience as a good novel that takes faith seriously on both the Catholic and Protestant divide.”
The story takes on the subject of all those sightings of images of the Virgin Mary. There have certainly been a rash of them that apparently are quite ridiculous and so the media has paid them some attention mostly as a subject of ridicule. Miraculous images are nothing new in the Church and of course there are some very good examples of very plausible ones such as Our Lady of Guadalupe. This interest provides the subtext of the plot.
The story centers around a young boy Nathan Gray from a broken family who lives with his mother. A rather intelligent child with a large imagination that on the surface seems to be an escape from the past of an abusive father. His dog Chewy might be man's best friend, but he is an imaginative man's best friend on the order of Harvey. One day this young man sees something that defies explanation and is on the order of the miraculous and then he soon discovers an image of Mary on a cement wall that seems more than just a random water stain.
The story is told through his eyes as he discovers more about Mary and the people involved in promoting what was becoming a new shrine. He has intellectual curiosity and even though he and his mother belong to a local Protestant Church he does not see anything incongruent with what he is learning. He also develops a friendship with one of the people in the local Catholic church in his small town along with the Catholic priest and also one of the pastors of the church he attends.
The novel involves the tensions of this boy with an active imagination reporting this miraculous image and then the coming crowds to see this image and the towns involvement in seeing this as an opportunity to bring more money into the coffers as the image is on public land. Further plot elements introduce some danger and further mysteries on a more material level.
I really enjoyed the telling of the story and the boy's reactions to the multiple events that developed. There were a couple of plot points that seemed to be of a more implausible nature, but they didn't ruin the story for me. This book is also not written as a novel disguised as Catholic apologetics and can easily be recommended to a wide audience as a good novel that takes faith seriously on both the Catholic and Protestant divide.”
