Books in Brief

Although uninitiated readers should certainly start from the beginning of the complex DragonKeeper series (DragonSpell; DragonQuest; DragonKnight), this fourth installment in the ongoing Christian fantasy will please its growing fan base. Whereas the third book focused most heavily on Bardon's adventures, this episode alternates between his story and the heroism of Kale, now Bardon's wife. Kale, charged with hatching and schooling a dragon army, enjoys help from her father but must summon strength and courage from reserves she didn't know she had. Many other fantasy series begin to wear thin after several books, but Paul continues to delight readers with new and unexpected dimensions of the world they have come to love. It's a challenge to keep up with the dizzying cast of characters, but the writing is crisp and the setting imaginative. This series will speak to all ages of Christian readers, from preadolescent on up. (July 17)

Blackstock's third novel in the Restoration series is slow-moving in the first half, but the pace picks up considerably in the second. The Branning family and their neighbors are now eight months into a worldwide blackout, trying to make ends meet and survive one crisis after another as violence rips their community apart. With the sheriff and his deputies desperately overworked and earning only a tiny fraction of their former pay, they can no longer keep their overcrowded, disease-ridden county jail under control. That means that it's up to Deni Branning to help clear the name of boy-next-door love interest Mark Green when he's wrongly accused of attempted murder. The novel reveals a heavy hand with religion, but Blackstock's overt sermonizing does offer some strong and wise thoughts on forgiveness: "Forgiveness was not an emotion," one character reflects. "You didn't have to feel it. You just had to do it." (July)

This first installment in the Sisters of Holmes County series is more of the same for Brunstetter, who has more than a million of her Amish-themed novels in print. Grace Hostettler is settling down to a conventional Amish life and marriage to a kind young man in her community. But when a stranger from her past shows up, she's forced to acknowledge the "English" life and family she left behind during her rowdy adolescent rumschpringe period. Will her new husband accept her when the secret of her past comes tumbling out? Unfortunately, technical problems mar this novel about second chances. Grace is a weak and uninteresting protagonist who is more an observer of the action than its leading lady. While Brunstetter's fans will no doubt appreciate the novel's loving—even hagiographic—portrait of the Amish, the Amish characters' dialogue often feels stilted and unnatural, impeded rather than enhanced by awkward sprinklings of Pennsylvania Dutch. Stock English characters, such as an intrusive reporter and an aggressive developer who wants to buy up Amish land, add little to the story. (July)

A lighthearted chick lit version of the Book of Job? Improbably, it works, primarily because of the marvelous humor and urbane sensibility that mark this third novel from the authors of Consider Lily and Emily Ever After. On a dime, New York publicist Jane Williams loses everything she holds dear—her boyfriend, her cool West Village apartment, her enviable job. To top it off, her dog gets sick, she's released as Brownie troop leader to the daughters of Manhattan's glitterati, and she's got a bizarre facial rash, making Jane lament that her life is now "worse than a country music song." Slowly, Jane comes to see God's love and providence in new ways—"though he hides it well, God must still be in charge," she muses—and is surprised to find herself developing romantic feelings for a Darcy-esque nemesis. Sex and the City without the sex, Dayton and Vanderbilt's novel is a laugh-out-loud love song to New York City. (June 12)