Review - Finding Grace by Donna VanLiere

Finding Grace: A True Story About Losing Your Way in Life...and Finding it Again
by: Donna VanLiere

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Press (March 31, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312380518
ISBN-13: 978-0312380519
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches

Reading Finding Grace, is like sitting down at a cozy table with a good friend and a delectably frothy coffee drink. A deliciously wonderful way to spend an afternoon. Donna VanLiere's writing is like talking candidly with a friend - complete with laughter, tears, and joy.

I have always been an avid fan and huge lover of Donna Vanliere's novels. They are so real, pure and tenderly touch the reader's heart. Now, after reading Finding Grace, I can say that I am a huge lover and avid fan of the person, behind those marvelous words, Donna VanLiere. I'm going to be completely honest when I say that Ms. VanLiere is no where near to the image that I had held in my mind, as few people usually are. By this, I mean that I would never have guessed the traumas and let downs that she experienced throughout her life, nor the struggles to fulfill what many people perceive as an easy accomplishment - motherhood. I never would have guessed at the awesome sense of humor that she has and has kept throughout all of the difficulties. This, in itself, can often be a miracle.

Through Finding Grace, Donna VanLiere, lets the reader into her life, the pains of living with sexual abuse at a young age, the struggles to catch a dream, only to realize that God has another plan in mind, going through years of infertility and the painful treatments involved to have that blessed event occur. Finding Grace is not a sad story, however, instead it is a story that brings hope, understanding and sheds beautiful light upon the fact that what we think is our dream, may not necessarily be God's dream for us. Life is far from easy, but if we keep faith, everything will come together and be even more glorious than what we had hoped. Without pain and heartache, a person would not truly be able to treasure the goodness and blessings that come into our life. Ms. VanLiere's story reiterates that fact, as well as the idea that to forgive someone is not letting them off the hook from what they did, but cleansing ourselves instead of weighing ourselves down with something that is not our fault.

The fact that Ms. VanLiere never set out to be a writer or an author of novels, amazes me. Being a freelance writer, things just lead to where they were suppose to and the novel writing seemed to just fall into place. I have always heard and believe that great things happen when you least expect it, or are not looking for it, and this appears to be the fact in this author's life as well.

The title, Finding Grace, describes the meaning behind the book perfectly. The idea that God's grace finds it's way to shine upon us, through even the tiniest of cracks, is a reassuring and comforting blanket to clasp around ourselves. On a personal level, Finding Grace touched me deeply. I have had many of the experiences that Ms. VanLiere had went through, including the abuse and infertility problems. It is not an easy thing, but by letting God's grace and love in, things will find a way to make a person stronger and better, in every aspect.

Finding Grace is a story that I highly recommend to everyone - whether you have read Ms. VanLiere's works before, or have not yet had the pleasure. Through this memoir, we are given the gift to glimpse the real person behind her extraordinary works. With awesome humor and sincerity, Donna VanLiere has penned a phenomenal story of her life and how, by finding grace, she truly is blessed.

*overall rating 5/5

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About Finding Grace:

Finding Grace is the powerful, often humorous, and deeply moving story of one woman’s journey of broken dreams. It is the story of how a painful legacy of the past is confronted and met with peace. This book is for anyone who has struggled to understand why our desires— even the simplest ones—are sometimes denied or who has questioned where God is when we need him most. This story is about one woman’s unlikely road to motherhood. Finally, it’s a book about the “undeserved gift which is life itself.” It’s the story of “Finding Grace.”

Donna VanLiere has entertained millions with her inspirational stories. In her new book, she gives us a candid look into her own life, a life filled with suffering and pain, but one that ultimately finds peace with itself.

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Excerpt:

Epigraph:

Lord, I suffer much. I cannot tell You what goes on inside of me, I cannot hide from You these dark battles, the deep despair. When God breathes on man, He opens his inner being and sees deeply within it.
Victor Hugo, French poet and novelist

Chapter One

We moved to our home in Medina, Ohio in the spring of 1970, when I was three. My brother Brian was seven and got his own room, the green one with the short, shaggy dark green carpet. I shared a room with my sister, Mary Jo (we call her Josie…like Jocie, not Jozey) who is nearly ten years older than me. We got the baby aspirin orange room with the orange shag carpet and my parents got the all purple room. The family room was pink, the living room blue and the kitchen had bluish-green patterned indoor-outdoor carpeting and avocado appliances. The house screamed 1960’s!

There were a few homes on our road but it was mostly farmland. Our split-level house had a long, black top driveway, huge front lawn, brick front, a white barn in the back that would hold my dad’s tractors and gardening equipment and over an acre of land behind the barn for a garden that could feed most of Medina County (my parents never believed in small gardens). Our neighbor Mr. Lake also had a garden behind his barn. Bud Lake had a round chest that was slick as a watermelon. It actually glistened on hot summer days when he worked outside. When we met Mr. Lake for the first time I whispered to my mother, “That man doesn’t have any hair on his chest.” She tried to shush me but I was three and lacked whispering skills. Mr. Lake believed in using manure for fertilizer. He’d haul in a huge load from somewhere and let it percolate inside his barn before he used it. His garden always smelled crappy but it was lovely.

A dairy was just up the street and Mr. Lake walked to work there every morning with his lunch pail in hand. Sometimes (but not nearly enough) he’d bring home a package of ice cream bars and hand them to me. Life couldn’t get any better than on those free ice cream bar days. One morning as I played in the driveway I was talking to myself, weaving together an outlandish tale full of colorful characters, intrigue and drama. I froze when I saw Mr. Lake peering from behind one of his trees, listening to me. “Go on,” he said. “I can’t wait to hear what happens.” Stage fright hit me and I couldn’t utter another word. I ran toward our garage door and heard Mr. Lake laughing from his yard.

Across the road was a pasture full of cows for the dairy and right next to us was an old farmhouse where our other neighbors lived. For the sake of this story I’ll just call them the “Taylor’s.” Theirs was not a charming farmhouse in any way. The exterior hadn’t been painted in years and what was left of the old paint fell like curly, white pencil shavings around the house. A distinct odor of aged, rotting wood, cigarettes, and filth met you before stepping onto the porch. My mother was and is a no nonsense woman. She and my father both grew up in east Tennessee working on farms that fed fifteen children in my father’s family and five in my mother’s. My dad’s oldest sibling, my Aunt Stella was born the same year as my maternal grandmother, Mary Hurley. As Grandma Hurley grew, got married and began having children of her own, my Grandma Payne was still giving birth to her fifteen children. When she died in 1972 her death certificate claimed she was just worn out.

My mother was always very practical (as I write this sitting at a plastic folding table I know the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree) and called things as she saw them. On more than one occasion I remember her looking at our neighbor’s home and saying, “Move next to a dump and you live next to trash.” I didn’t know what she meant.

When we moved to Medina my mom worked at the latex factory, the flower container factory and then later, the box factory. (My sister eventually worked at the pickle factory.) My mother settled on cleaning homes as a business because she could set her own hours and be home when we got off the school bus in the afternoon. My dad worked second shift in one of the steel mills in Cleveland; the same one he’d worked in since he moved to Ohio in 1955 and ultimately retired from forty years later. At night I’d fall asleep in my mother’s bed and when my dad got home in the early morning hours he carried me to my orange room. I never remembered a thing.

After I learned to read I would crawl into bed with my mom and read her stories. Mother would come home from the factory and make dinner for my siblings and me, maybe do a load of laundry or scrub a spot on the indoor/outdoor kitchen carpet before turning in each night. I’d rifle through my books or the ones we’d picked up at the library and read one after the other out loud to my mother as she fell asleep. I’d look over at her and think, “Why are you so tired?” I’d read till I got sleepy and then turn out the light, thinking about new books to bring home.

George and Tess Taylor lived next door to us with their five children who were all much older than me except Tom, who was my age. Sometime after our move I walked across the field that divided our homes with my mother and met the Taylors. Tom was in the yard playing with the family’s shaggy, bounding yellow dog. “I’m Tom,” he said, pounding the dog’s side. “And this is Ziggy, the butt sniffing dog.” He smacked the dog’s muzzle back and forth and took off running. Ziggy chased after him and pushed his snoot into Tom’s rear end, hoisting him into the air. “That’s why we call him a butt sniffer,” Tom yelled, laughing.

“Stop doing that to that dog,” Tess said, taking a drag off her cigarette. “You’ll turn him mean.” Tess had a mess of reddish orange hair and the longest toenails I’d ever seen in my life. She was wearing sandals (no way those nails could fit inside a shoe) and an orange jump suit with a belt that tied in the front. Although it was the seventies I can proudly say that my mother never owned a polyester jumpsuit. Tess was down to earth and warm and called me Sugar Pop most of the time.

Tom had dark hair and eyes like his dad, his brother Kevin and his sister, Cindy who had enormous breasts. Of course the hugeness was accentuated by the lack of bra she often excluded. As Tom and I played in the back yard one day he stopped, doubled over and vomited right on his feet. I ran to the house to find Cindy. She was on the front porch, ironing. Her breasts swayed from side to side as she moved the iron back and forth over a shirt. “Tom just puked,” I said.

“He did what?”

I couldn’t remember the other word for puke. My mind raced: It was a grown-up word, what did it start with? Hurry. Hurry. Oh, I got nothing. “He just opened his mouth and all sorts of chunks flew out,” I said. She jumped off the porch and I couldn’t believe that whatever was under her t-shirt was actually attached to her body. She helped Tom to the porch and went back to her ironing. I watched in silence then finally asked, “Do you have water balloons under there?” She reared her head back and laughed. I didn’t know if that was a yes or no.

To continue reading this excerpt, (click here)

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A bit about Donna VanLiere:

Donna VanLiere is a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author and gifted conference speaker. She has published eight titles including The Christmas Shoes and The Christmas Blessing, both of which were adapted into movies and big ratings for CBS television. Lifetime has adapted The Christmas Hope with plans to air it in the winter of 09. Her non-seasonal novel, The Angels of Morgan Hill, has captured the same warmth as her Christmas books and continues to please loyal and new fans alike.

Donna is the recipient of a Retailer's Choice Award for Fiction, a Dove Award, a Silver Angel Award, an Audie Award for best inspirational fiction, and a nominee for a Gold Medallion Book of the Year. Donna is an in-demand conference speaker having appeared at countless women's and family events, including select Women of Faith conferences.

Donna's latest book, Finding Grace (March 2009) is the powerful and often humorous story of her journey of broken dreams. There comes a time when the wheels come off in everybody's life. No one plans to get a divorce, go bankrupt, suffer depression, or get cancer. The wheels come off and we're left asking, "Now what?" This is the story of how pain and shattered dreams can be confronted and met with peace - simply put, it is the story of finding grace.

Donna lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with her husband, Troy, and their children, Grace, Kate and David, their labradoodle Lucy, their cats Cindy and Katrina and several raccoons who desperately want to be part of their family.

Be sure to visit the author's website: http://www.donnavanliere.com/

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Other great works by Donna VanLiere:

They Walked With Him (Howard Publishing, 2001)
Sheltering Trees: The Power, Promise, and Refuge of Friendship (Howard Publishing, 2001)
The Christmas Shoes (St. Martin's Press, 2001)
The Christmas Blessing (St. Martin's Press, 2003)
High Calling: The Courageous Life and Faith of Space Shuttle Columbia Commander Rick Husband, by Evelyn Husband & Donna VanLiere (Thomas Nelson, 2004)
The Christmas Hope (St. Martin's Press, 2005)
The Angels of Morgan Hill (St. Martin's Press, 2006)
The Christmas Promise (St. Martin's Press, 2007)
The Angels of Morgan Hill, paperback (St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2007)
Finding Grace (St. Martin's Press, March 2009)
The Christmas Secret (St. Martin's Press, October 2009)