205. Ruth Hymn

This hymn was planned as a companion to an Advent midweek sermon series that a Lutheran pastor friend of mine was considering publishing as a pulpit resource for time-strapped preachers. My preparation for writing it included reading all four of the pastor's sermons, which focus respectively on Ruth 1:20-21; Ruth 2:10; Ruth 3:13; and Ruth 4:17. As in my previous hymn for an Advent series, the intent here is for Stanza 1 to open the hymn and Stanza 6 to close it each week, and the appropriate stanza for each week to be inserted between them. The hymn-tune I have in mind is the early American tune FOUNDATION (Southern Harmony, New Haven, 1835), often paired with the hymn "How firm a foundation, you saints of the Lord."

O Lord, who our Savior ere all time begot,
Whose word calls what is out of that which was not:
Call us to believe, when forlorn our ways seem,
You are of our blood, and will surely redeem!

Though You, Father, give and at times take away,
Help us bear affliction and faithfully say:
In favor or out, both to break and to heal,
With justice and love You unerringly deal.

But who, Lord, are we that have found here such grace,
And stand undestroyed by the light of Your face?
That you count as righteous all who but believe
Surpasses all good that our works can achieve!

Your will is not idle, but earnest and true,
To bring men salvation through knowledge of You;
This gift is as sure as Your strong, active Word,
Which also grants faith where Your promise is heard.

Grant, therefore, the patience to wait for the Son,
At time of His choosing, by what He has done,
The ransomed of all flesh to raise and to heal,
And comfort eternal at last to reveal!

Come, Savior! Come quickly, and hasten to give
Your servants a portion with them who now live!
Call us from vain things, and from things that decay;
Redeem this dim hour by Your brightening day!

Squashed

Squashed
by Joan Bauer
Recommended Ages: 13+

Ellie, a high school junior in Rock River, Iowa, really cares about growing a giant pumpkin for the town's harvest fair. She calls it Max, and senses its moods, and eventually (with a bit of prodding from a cute classmate named Wes) even talks to it. She worries about bugs, hail damage, rot, and other natural hazards that can beset enormous vegetables. She worries, not without reason, about pumpkin burglars. She puts Max ahead of her homework, her social life, and even her relationship with her widower dad. All she wants, besides losing a few pounds of her own, is to see Max put on a lot of them and beat the reigning weigh-in contest champion, a slimy character named Cyril.

Ellie is joined in her gourd-driven quest by a baseball crazy cousin named Richard, a hysterical dog named Spider, and her wise Nana, who knows a lot about working with the soil. But she has to be a fighter to raise a giant pumpkin, a quest that will push her emotional and physical limits. Win or lose, raising Max will lead Ellie to find healing, romance, and the respect of her community.

This 1992 book was the first novel by the author of Rules of the Road and Hope Was Here. Having read these books, I sense a pattern in Bauer's work: a knack for discovering emotional truths in a story about a teenager with one all-absorbing, mature-for-her-years passion. Bauer's other titles since this book include Best Foot Forward, Thwonk, Sticks, Backwater, Stand Tall, Peeled, Close to Famous, Almost Home, Tell Me, and most recently, Soar.

The Lighthouse War

The Lighthouse War
by Adrian McKinty
Recommended Ages: 13+

In a previous adventure, New York-born teen Jamie O'Neill and his mother moved to a small island off the coast of Northern Ireland - population: themselves - where the silent, one-armed boy and his funny, brainy friend Ramsay MacDonald made an amazing discovery. Using a family heirloom called the Salmon of Knowledge - really, an artifact of an ancient race not of Earth - they fell through a wormhole to the distant planet of Altair. There Jamie got back his arm (temporarily) and his voice (for good), helped save an alien civilization from an invading horde, and fell in love with a delicate yet tough beauty named Wishaway. Then he had to come home to save his mom, but thanks to a used-up battery, the Salmon wouldn't take him back to Altair.

I don't usually give that much background before getting down to what a book is about, but in this case, the reminder is useful. Although I'd had this sequel in my collection since very soon after I read Jamie's first adventure, I let enough years pass before reading it that I had forgotten almost everything about it except the lingering impression of a superbly designed dust jacket. Someone who saw me reading it at a chorus rehearsal asked me to let him have the book after I was done with it, simply because he liked the cover art. That was ages ago. Without the first book to consult, I found my way back into the world of Jamie's adventures with no difficulty. This book filled in all the gaps in my memory, just when they needed to be filled, without any awkward sense of time being wasted on a review of things past (like, say, in the first paragraph of this review). That's a tough balance to hit.

Another thing this book brought back to me was the enjoyment of crisp dialogue between interesting characters. The dialogue carries the reader over the threshold of willingly suspending disbelief while two-thirds of a rock band, fresh back from a miserable showing at a Belfast-Has-Talent audition, recover their spirits by replenishing the Salmon's power supply. They only black out half of Ulster in the process. Then Ramsay, his much older half-brother Brian, Jamie, and Jamie's mother Anna take a quick peek at Altair, just for fun. The fun turns into trouble when Brian and Anna are captured by the Witch Queen of Alkhava, while Ramsay and Jamie end up facing her brother, the bitter and scarred Lord Protector Ksar, in a battle against their friends.

Jamie finds out Wishaway waited exactly a year for him to return, and only a few days have passed since she accepted the marriage proposal of young Prince Lorca of the Oralands. As if to sharpen his heartache, they return to her city after Ksar escapes, only to receive an ultimatum from Alkhava, demanding the Salmon in exchange for Brian and Anna. The Witch Queen wants to lead her people to Earth, to escape the increasingly hostile climate of their dying planet. Ksar just wants to avenge his personal injuries on Jamie and Ramsay, who bested him a year ago.

With Wishaway's people refusing to help, Jamie accepts an offer of help from Lorca's royal grandfather - who, however, has his own designs on the Salmon, and is willing to murder Jamie to get it. Before this becomes an issue, however, the friends must face their enemy at the gates of the Witch Queen's capital city. Their survival, not to mention the fate of worlds, soon depends on a small group fighting for survival in a harsh wilderness, with enemies at their heels and weird, alien mysteries ahead. Romantic tension, betrayal, deadly battle, and a wild ride in a machine not built for human passengers fill the climactic pages of this book. And though its conclusion is very satisfying, it does leave certain questions wide open for another sequel.

This is the second book of the Lighthouse trilogy, between The Lighthouse Land and The Lighthouse Keepers. Adrian McKinty is a native of Northern Ireland who lived several years in the U.S., and currently resides in Australia. Most of his fiction comprises crime novels for adults, and is often based on his native country's period known as the Troubles. Their titles include Dead I Well May Be, Police at the Station And They Don't Look Friendly, and Orange Rhymes With Everything.

A Dog's Purpose

A Dog's Purpose
by W. Bruce Cameron
Recommended Ages: 13+

A while ago, I bought a trade-paperback copy of a funny, romantic mystery-thriller called The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man off a Walmart magazine rack. Every so often, I've gone back to Walmart looking for its sequel, Repo Madness. I just liked the first book that much. Late last week, while I was doing that very search, I spotted this book by the same author, and decided to give it a shot. And now, several wads of Kleenex later, I can definitely say the experiment was worthwhile.

A Dog's Purpose is a heart-warming, tear-jerking story told from the first-person perspective of a dog - perhaps better described as a series of dogs, but basically the same doggy consciousness. With each rebirth, he (or, in one lifetime, she) remembers his or her past-life experiences, but wants to end the cycle of reincarnation by trying to discover its purpose as a dog, and accomplishing it. It hangs onto lessons learned in previous lives, helping it home in on achieving its purpose - which has something to do with finding and saving people, something to do with having the intelligence and fearlessness to explore its world, and a whole lot to do with loving, and being loved by, one special boy named Ethan.

I'm done summarizing the story now, for two reasons. First, I've already gotten myself choked up. I'm an emotional mess. Forget about it. The second reason is, if you knew any more, I would have to kill you to prevent the spoilers from spreading any further. And, as you already know, I'm too verklempt to make the effort. It's a lovely book, full of laugh-aloud humor and sob-aloud sorrow, heart-warming affection, and just a little of the mystery-thriller action I was angling for when I trawled the Walmart magazine aisle. I loved the characters, including the humans, dogs, cats, a donkey, and more. I cheered for the hero dog's quest to escape the wheel of doggy karma. And I realized that, in spite of their limitations, a dog's point of view really can be the focus of an excellent story.

Soon (like, January 2017) to be a film starring Dennis Quaid, this book has a sequel, A Dog's Journey, and two spin-off novels designed for younger readers, Ellie's Story and Bailey's Story. Ellie and Bailey, by the way, are the names of two of the hero dog's avatars in the original novel. Most of Cameron's other novels also seem to involve dogs, including the "Repo Man" series, whose main character's best friend is a bassett hound. Cameron is also the author of several non-fiction humor books, including 8 Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter.

Deeper Than the Dead

Deeper Than the Dead
by Tami Hoag
Recommended Ages: 15+

Anne Navarre is a fifth-grade teacher in Oak Knoll, California, who once aspired to be a child psychologist, until her mother died and she had to move home to take care of her cold, selfish father. Vince Leone is an FBI profiler on medical leave due to having a bullet in his head, who has come to town with half a mind to recruit an ambitious young sheriff's detective named Tony Mendez as his replacement. Between them and a few other deputies, they have to stop a serial killer who has killed at least three women, and who has already abducted his fourth victim. This creep becomes known as the See No Evil killer, because he superglues his victims' eyes and lips shut before torturing and strangling them.

Four of Anne's students found the body of Victim No. 3, gruesomely left half-buried in a wooded park. While she tries to help them deal with this disturbing discovery, they show varying types and degrees of psychological damage from the experience. Meantime, Vince's profile seems to fit the fathers of at least three of the kids - a charming dentist who has to put up with a controlling, histrionic wife; a handsome lawyer who cheats on his wife; and an abusive, woman-hating deputy whose career is all "by the book, no mercy." Worse, all three men have ties with the local women's organization, whose staff and clients seem to be the killer's prey of choice.

While the investigation is sidetracked by a trail of evidence leading to a second and unrelated killer, sending shudders through a pleasant town that only a week ago had never known a murder before, the cycle of tragedy goes into overdrive. At the center of the whirlwind are four deeply scarred children, three families being torn apart by the strain of the investigation, two lonely hearts swiftly drawn together by a May-September romance, and at least one child who is fated to learn that his (or her) idolized father is a murdering psychopath. As time runs out for the missing fourth victim, as pressure builds on both the cops and the creeps, as pits of personal and professional ruin yawn before the innocent and guilty alike, it becomes inevitable that more blood will be shed before the bad guy is caught - if, indeed, he can be stopped at all.

This is a superbly crafted mystery-thriller by the experienced author of many novels of crime and romance, including the Quaid Horses and Doucet trilogies, the Rainbow Chasers quartet, the two-book Deer Lake, Elena Estes, and Broussard & Fourcade series, and the six or seven Kovac/Liska novels, besides nine or ten stand-alone titles such as McKnight in Shining Armor and Kill the Messenger. This book, the first installment in the Oak Knoll trilogy, is a strong introduction to a group of vividly realized characters, a believably complex community in which danger simmers under a charming and safe-seeming surface, and an intriguing look back at the state of crime detection in 1985, when police had to get by without computer databases and DNA analysis. It's a detailed and compelling glimpse of police procedure in an era when fingerprints had to be compared by the human eye, when "cellular telephones" were such rare, clunky luxury items that detectives could reasonably ask why a suspect would need one, and when people frequently dropped pop-culture references about Miami Vice and Magnum, P.I..

Ah, those were the days! Instead of CSI gizmos, cops confronted by a serial killer had to rely on criminal profiling, which itself was brand-new and imperfectly trusted. But at the heart of this mystery is a young teacher's love for her kids, even for one who is horribly, irreparably damaged. She only hopes it may not be too late to help the other three. But her danger and their danger become intertwined in ways that flood the reader's inner world with sympathy, then anxiety, then downright dread. The story winds up to a terrific climax, fueled by flawless theatrics and darn-near flawless writing. My hopes are high for the sequels, Secrets to the Grave and Down the Darkest Road.

Nine Lives

Nine Lives
by Wendy Corsi Staub
Recommended Ages: 13+

After losing her husband and her teaching job in quick succession, recent widow Bella packs up her 5-year-old son Max and what belongings will fit into her small car and hits the road, hoping to make it from the New York City suburbs to her mother-in-law's cold, unfriendly home in Ohio with only one night camping out along the way. But somewhere in western New York state, a storm blows up, and a mysterious billboard advertising a non-existent campground leads them astray. But it is finally an encounter with a very pregnant cat that leads them to the odd little village of Lily Dale, birthplace of the Spiritualist movement and home to many psychics and mediums to this day. An attempt to return the queen kitty to her owner leads, somehow, to Bella being hired as a temporary manager for a guesthouse just as the town's busy season of psychic readings picks up.

She doesn't believe in all the mystical stuff that brings everyone else to town. She just wants to move on, both in her grieving process and in her search for a new home, as soon as her car gets out of the repair shop. But during a weekend of spooky manifestations and all-too-real human threats, Bella finds herself at the center of a web of mystery. If the eyewitness testimony of a rambunctious little boy and the clairvoyant dream of an eccentric neighbor count for anything, they add up to the possibility the owner of the cat and the guesthouse was murdered - possibly by the same person who has been sneaking around the guesthouse and attacking solitary guests. Before Bella can decide whether to accept Lily Dale's offer of a home and perhaps a little romance, she must learn to trust the eccentric people around her. But to do that, she may have to solve a mystery that puts her and everyone she loves in danger.

This is a fast-reading, emotionally involving piece of entertainment by a seasoned author whose sentences, only once in a while, go clunk. Parts of it were touching enough to make me feel misty-eyed with sympathy, for example, when she praises little Max's courage when, loaded into the car and about to leave behind the only home he has ever known, his small voice says "Yes" to his mother's "Are you ready to go?" The mystery has its thrills and its red herrings, and in spite of one character's complaint there are no straight, available men in town, Lily Dale presents Bella with an overabundance of romantic choices - no doubt, to be explored in more detail in subsequent books.

This is the first of (so far) two books in the "Lily Dale Mystery" series, not to be confused with the four-book "Lily Dale" series, featuring a character mentioned but not seen in this book. The sequel is titled Something Buried, Something Blue. Sometimes writing as Wendy Markham or Wendy Morgan, Wendy Corsi Staub is also the author of the Campus Life 101, Live to Tell, Nightwatcher, and Murphy's Landing series, plus numerous other novels, mostly of the paranormal thriller and crime thriller types; some books for younger readers, such as Henry Hopkins and the Horrible Halloween Happening; and several mysteries co-authored with former New York City mayor Edward I. Koch.

Two Movies in Three Scenes

Within the past few weeks, I've gone to see two movies in theaters.

Fantastic Beasts

On Thursday night, Nov. 15, I caught a sneak preview of the new movie from the Harry Potter universe, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Written directly for the screen by J.K. Rowling herself, it exults in the ability to get its whole story out on screen, without having to cut all the connective bits that made an original novel make sense. The critics have already done a great job of pointing out how the film welcomes viewers in with a Pokemon Go!-esque "find the fantastic beasts" storyline, while slowly warming up to a much darker and more dramatic tale about a repressed magic gone septic and how that fits into a dark wizard's agenda.

My only two complaints about the movie were that said dark wizard's final remark is so cryptic (What was that about dying a little?) and that it wasted some attractive characters, such as the newspaper editor (played by Jon Voight) and his younger son (Ronan Raftery), who after a certain point just stand there and visibly react to what's going on in front of them. There must be some important reason for including these characters in the movie; perhaps it will become clear in a sequel, of which (I hear) there will be four.

Three scenes that "make" this movie for me:

1. Newt Scamander (recent Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne) performs a mating dance to coax an erumpent (don't ask) into his suitcase, which is much bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. Combined with the subsequent madcap chase across part of New York's Central Park, this is comedic genius with a bite of the bizarre. It's also deftly choreographed, exciting, and suspenseful.

2. Ordered to their deaths, Newt and American witch Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston, Sam's daughter) fight their way out of an execution chamber where victims are apparently supposed to be lowered, via levitating chair, into a pool of some kind of annihilating liquid. Sorry, I haven't read the screenplay, so I don't know how to describe this. It's just an incredibly creepy scene.

3. Samantha Morton, playing an anti-magic fanatic, checks out a street urchin for signs of the witch's mark, then pronounces him OK. Her menacing sweetness channeled Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Hacksaw Ridge

I meant to see this on my recent interstate vacation as well, but my plans changed on short notice (again, don't ask). Just saw it tonight. Bawled through a good deal of it. Saw an impressive amount of none-too-subtle Christian symbolism woven into its imagery. Appreciated that it was a powerful war movie about a pacifist who stuck to his convictions in the face of tremendous adversity - ultimately earning the first Congressional Medal of Honor ever awarded to a conscientious objector. It's sickeningly violent but also a moving testimony to the power of conviction and the importance of the freedom to live by it.

Three scenes that "make" this movie for me:

1. Army medic Desmond Doss (played by sometime Spiderman Andrew Garfield, almost the lone American in a mostly Australian cast) sits all alone in carnage-strewn battlefield, after trying but failing to save a buddy's life. In a rare moment of doubt, he desperately asks God, "What do you want from me?" Long pregnant pause. Then a man's voice comes to him out of the falling night: "Medic!"

2. In the opening moments of the movie, a drunk Hugo Weaving (as Doss' father), visiting his World War I buddies' graves to share a drop of whiskey with them, loses control and smashes the bottle against one of the gravestones. Blood drips on the stone. As he wraps up his cut hand, he dryly says, "Well, that's all I have for you today." It's hard not to love practically every scene Weaving is in. While I'm at it, I might as well also mention one in which his character bursts into tears at the dinner table after telling off the first of his two sons who has decided to enlist in World War II. It's not every actor who can turn an abusive drunk into a sympathetic character.

3. The scene in which Doss finally, against his convictions, touches a gun - only to use the rifle as part of an improvised litter to drag a wounded sergeant (Vince Vaughn) to safety. Vaughn's moment of disbelief was matched only by mine, since my research prior to viewing the film told me that, in reality, Doss used the stock of a rifle to bandage his own badly broken arm after being hit by multiple rounds of enemy fire, before dragging himself to safety. And this, in turn, was after he was hit, and while being stretchered out of the combat area, made the stretcher bearers leave him and take a more seriously injured man instead. What I'm saying is, although many people may have a hard time believing Doss' heroism as depicted in this film, it actually undersells it - big-time.

I'm not a Seventh Day Adventist, as Doss was. Nor is Mel Gibson, who directed this movie. I don't hold Doss' conviction about touching deadly weapons - a conviction that, according to the movie, turns out to be based more on incidents in Doss' boyhood than on the letter of SDA doctrine. But I am pretty impressed to see a movie mounted on this scale, depicting a Christian man who never compromises the tenets of his faith in spite of every shade of opposition ranging from reason to an imminent threat of prison, and depicting him as a hero who brings hope, courage, humility, and awe to the men around him. Sam Worthington asking Andrew Garfield for forgiveness may strike some as a bit too strong. But there is something admirable even about men who have the bigness to repent when they are proven wrong. And there is something utterly, movingly satisfying about this movie, all the way to the pre-credits footage depicting the aftermath of the dramatized events.