Long Way Home by Lynn Austin … and a GIVEAWAY!

Welcome to Friday Reads!

 

 

You can enter to win a print copy of Long Way Home by Lynn Austin, courtesy of the publisher. Share on X (US ONLY!) You can enter by using the Rafflecopter link at the bottom of this post. (Contest ends June 24, 2022.) If you’re the chosen winner, I’ll contact you for your information to pass along.

 

About the book…

 

In this gripping portrait of war and its aftermath from bestselling author Lynn Austin, a young woman searches for the truth her childhood friend won’t discuss after returning from World War II, revealing a story of courage, friendship, and faith.

Peggy Serrano couldn’t wait for her best friend to come home from the war. But the Jimmy Barnett who returns is much different from the Jimmy who left, changed so drastically by his experience as a medic in Europe that he can barely function. When he attempts the unthinkable, his parents check him into the VA hospital. Peggy determines to help the Barnetts unravel what might have happened to send their son over the edge. She starts by contacting Jimmy’s war buddies, trying to identify the mysterious woman in the photo they find in Jimmy’s belongings.

Seven years earlier, sensing the rising tide against her people, Gisela Wolff and her family flee Germany aboard the passenger ship St. Louis, bound for Havana, Cuba. Gisela meets Sam Shapiro on board and the two fall quickly in love. But the ship is denied safe harbor and sent back to Europe. Thus begins Gisela’s perilous journey of exile and survival, made possible only by the kindness and courage of a series of strangers she meets along the way, including one man who will change the course of her life.

 

Finding Purpose from Suffering: How God Sometimes Allows Suffering to Lead to Our/His Purpose

by Lynn Austin

Years ago, my husband and I endured a long season of infertility. I ached for a child and couldn’t understand why God wasn’t answering my prayers. When we learned of a young, unmarried woman who was planning an abortion, we quickly offered to adopt her child. Thankfully, she canceled the abortion. But later, she and her boyfriend decided to marry and raise their baby. Because of this experience, I recognized the need for a clinic that would offer women an alternative to abortion and give childless couples the hope of adoption. I became actively involved in the right-to-life movement and helped to establish two crisis pregnancy centers to serve those needs. God used a painful season in my life to accomplish His purpose—and to save hundreds of unborn babies’ lives.

Looking back, we can sometimes see a purpose for our suffering that isn’t apparent at the time. It doesn’t diminish the pain, but we realize that God can use the difficult times in our lives to steer us toward a greater purpose if we turn our pain over to Him. A friend of mine grew up in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic parent; God later transformed her pain into a ministry to hurting women. Another friend’s unsettled childhood in foster care led her to teach in a low-income school district ministering to children from similar backgrounds. A third friend who’d been very ill as a child later became a gifted pediatrician. All three found their purpose through suffering, along with healing from God.

I was thinking of their stories and many others like them when writing my newest World War II novel, Long Way Home. Gisela Wolff is a Jewish woman from Berlin who suffers because of the Nazi persecution of her people. Her family persuades her to adopt the identity of a Gentile so she can study to be a nurse, in spite of the pain it causes her to be separated from her loved ones. “You have no idea how God might want to use your nursing skills in the future,” her friend Sam tells her. After the war, when the Nazi concentration camps are liberated by the Allies, Gisela is well-equipped to care for the victims:

I took patients’ vital signs, adjusted IV tubes, gave sponge baths, and hand-fed people too weak to feed themselves. I talked with them and listened to their stories. The SS barracks was filled with the most desperate cases, but many thousands in the camp outside still had urgent needs for nursing care, too. . . . The work I did in the following weeks helped restore me to wholeness. At last, I had found the reason for my becoming a nurse.

It seems impossible for Gisela—and for us—to find a greater purpose in the Nazi Holocaust. In Long Way Home, someone offers Gisela this hope: “I realize that it is impossible to see any sane reason for what the Nazis did to us. But if the doors to Palestine are flung open because of it, and if the Jewish people are able to return to our homeland after two thousand years, future generations will see this terrible trial as the hand of God. . . . You have lost family members, yes? Your parents, perhaps? . . . If you could ask them if they would be willing to give up their lives to make sure you and your children and grandchildren had a homeland, a place where no one could ever persecute you or make you leave again, what do you think they would say?”

There isn’t an easy answer to this question, nor to the question of why God allows suffering. The writer of Ecclesiastes said it this way: “As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things” (11:5). Yet our suffering can bring glory to God if we offer it to Him, trusting that He does have a purpose we may not see.

 

My review…

I’ve read and enjoyed other books by this author, so I was excited to read her latest, particularly as it’s a dual-timeline WWII-era novel (which are some of my favorite reads).

It’s easy to connect with and root for Gisela and Peggy, two well-crafted heroines. While this is a wonderful story, I must warn you that it is an emotional, yet necessary, read. The author touches on things from the past that shouldn’t be forgotten. It definitely tugs at your heartstrings.

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy, but I wasn’t required to leave a positive review.

 

About Lynn…

 

Lynn Austin has sold more than one and a half million copies of her books worldwide. A former teacher who now writes and speaks full-time, she has won eight Christy Awards for her historical fiction and was one of the first inductees into the Christy Award Hall of Fame. One of her novels, Hidden Places, was made into a Hallmark Channel Original Movie. Lynn and her husband have three grown children and make their home in western Michigan. Visit her online at lynnaustin.org

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