Bloggy Book Review: The Gathering Storm by Brock & Bodie Thoene

As Nazi forces tighten the noose, Loralei Kepler, daughter of a German resistance leader, must flee her beloved Germany. But is any place safe from Adolf Hitler's evil grasp? Loralei's harrowing flight leads her into the arms of needy child refugees, who have sacrificed everything in exchange for their lives, and toward a mysterious figure, who closely guards an age-old secret.

Explore the romance, the passion, and the danger of the most anticipated series of the last twenty years.

Born from the highly acclaimed and best-loved novels of three generations of readers -- The Zion Covenant series and The Zion Chronicles series -- Zion Diaries ventures into the lives of the inspiring and intriguing characters who loved intensely, stood up for what was right, and fought boldly during Hitler's rise to power and the dark days of World War II.

If you would like to read the first chapter of The Gathering Storm, go HERE.

I have been a long-time fan of the Thoene's writings. As a history major, I devoured their long, meaty series set during World War 1, World War 2, and the Jews reclaiming of Israel after WW2. This book fits in right along with their other series, with the setting taking place mainly in London as the main characters works with those evicted from their home countries. To be truthful, I didn't care for this one as much as their earlier works. I know I am definitely not in the same league as them as either a Biblical or historical scholar, but I was surprised by the ending and found it a little unbelievable. That said, it is still a very interesting book if you are a fan of historical fiction and the Thoenes in general. 


This book was provided to me free for review purposes by the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance and Summerside Press. 

Link Love

Also known as recent internet-ish finds for you to enjoy on your Saturday:

• Tropical Oatmeal Yogurt - tried this out this week. I loved it (with pineapple and coconut) but the girls were not so thrilled. So sad, more for me. : )
• Mt. Hope Academy (a new homeschool blog find for me) has been putting up information on her art and music studies that she is doing with her three boys. Mozart was posted this week and I'm definitely going to borrow some of her ideas.
• Scroll down on this post to see the cute handprint wreath that Monika posted on the write.click.scrapbook blog. Looks super cute and I may attempt something like that this year for Christmas ... we'll see.
• I've already bookmarked this idea about Alphabet Summer for my girls for next year. This will be perfect for the girls next year!
• As I've had a little time in the afternoons while the girls are resting, I've been going back and looking at Ali Edwards' December Daily posts and ideas. I have done a December Daily album for about 3 (4?) years now and I am pretty sure I want to do one this year, especially since it will be our first Christmas with our new little guy. Trying to go ahead do some thinking on it so I don't wait until the last minute on an album plan, etc. and then it gets too complicated. Simple is key this year, I believe.

And as for my Saturday plans today ... we're on day three of a conference Travis has been attending. (Thankfully he's home in the evenings, but we're missing Daddy on this Saturday). The girls and I are going to work on going through all of Noelle's clothes to see what fits for this fall as well as a little room rearranging. I'm thinking there will probably be a Sonic run as well for a mommy-pick-me-up later!

Simple Celebrations

We've completed (survived?) our first week of school. This calls for a little celebration with homemade chocolate chip cookies to go along with this week's family pizza and movie night.

Reading about China for Read Aloud Thursday

This week we have been easing back into school and we started out with a Download N Go study about China. As we have had our read-aloud time this morning we have checked out several different books and have found some that we have really enjoyed. I won't go into a big description of each because that would make this far too long, but I'll try and note a few favorites.



D is for Dancing Dragon is from Sleeping Bear Press, and we always enjoy their alphabet journeys through different states and countries. We have several of these on our personal shelf - what I love is that it has a simple rhyme throughout the book perfect for my little ones to listen, and the sidebar of each page is full of extra information if you want to go in depth on some of the different highlighted subjects. Some of these books even have teacher guides on the Sleeping Bear website which is also very cool. These will be great resources over the years and I love picking them up as I have a chance.

Some other non-fiction books that we used to get an overview of China were Look What Came from China and Welcome to China. Welcome to China was probably my favorite because it was published fairly recently - current enough to mention the Olympics which were hosted there two years ago.



The next three books are all variations of the same Chinese folk tale - seven siblings (or five) that each have a special ability which enables them to help each other out of a predicament.







Tikki Tikki Tembo is a classic tale of the little boy with a long name who falls into the well. My girls love this story and I love the bright artwork on these pages. One of our favorites.

The Story about Ping is a Five in a Row classic that we are just now reading for the first time. I am going to try and remember to make plans to spend more time with this book next year when Natalie starts kindergarten.

One of the few missionary biographies that my library had that was at an appropriate age range for my girls. We enjoyed the story of Ms. Aylward and Noelle pronounced her work in China with young girls as "cool."



I'll share a bit more about Lon Po Po next Tuesday when my Children's Classic Award Winners post will hopefully be up. : )

And with that, I'm stopping! We have two more days to finish up in China this week and as we've read these books aloud each day, it's definitely made our "trip" there more pleasant!

For more Read-Aloud Thursday posts, head over to Amy's at Hope is the Word.

Eight

Two people.

Eight years.

One house.

Three girl babies.

One very anticipated boy baby.

Much laughter.

Lots of forgiveness.

Happy Anniversary to my favorite person in the whole world.

Photo: Thanksgiving 2006, Clingman's Dome, TN

Free Scrapbook / Journaling Class

A link worth checking out if you scrapbook or just enjoy journaling. Elle's Studio has some CUTE little scrapbook embellishments and I'm looking foward to what they put together in this class! 

First Day

Hello first grader.

This is her kindergarten picture from last year. I didn't even realize this morning that she had the same dress on until I pulled up this picture. Noticing the dress is about 5 inches shorter and requires leggings to make it wearable. Time is flying.

To Wrap Up July & Head into August

In July, I (and the little folks around my house) participated in the Narnia Reading Challenge sponsored by Carrie at Reading to Know. My original goals were to read/finish The Silver Chair with my girls and to listen to the last two books, The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle, on audio during our family vacation.

I'm happy to say that we completed all proposed goals! I don't have any big, in-depth insights to share from the books. It had been a LONG time since I had read any of these stories so they felt very new to me as we went through them. I found that I have very ambivalent feelings about The Silver Chair. I had a hard time enjoying the characters of Eustace and Jill (although I learned to like Eustace very much in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader). Much of time, I felt like it was just a place holder in the series. The middle book that takes you from point A to point B but seems like filler a lot of the time. (Please don't hate!) : )

We also did listen to the last books of the series on our trip and it has renewed my interested to read (with the girls) and re-read (for myself) those books again! I didn't remember much of either of those stories (or The Horse and His Boy for that matter either) and it was fun reconnecting with them. While the girls and I are taking a small break on our Narnia reading for something a little lighter before school starts, I do anticipate we'll get back to them again before next year's Narnia challenge. At least, I hope so!

Next up is Amy's (at Hope is the Word) To Kill a Mockingbird challenge. Doesn't this well-worn copy look impressive?

Sadly, I've never read this book although it's been on my shelf a long time! I'm going to aim to tackle this one in August (along with school, etc.) so that will be the extent of my goals! However, Amy did mention that there is movie made of this book so I may try and tack that on as well, after I read the book, of course. : ) Coincidentally, I read a really interesting article on the book and it's author in the July issue of Southern Living. I didn't realize this was the author's only book, and that she is extremely reticent to discuss it or really accept any recognition because of it. Her hometown of Monroe, Alabama is very sensitive to her wishes and while they have a few things planned for this anniversary year of the book, they are keeping it fairly low-key overall.

Happy reading!

Planning for First Grade

We are getting excited about school starting next week for us. This summer has gone by very fast, but I think we are ready and rested for first grade for the oldest and a little pre-K work for our middle girl. I have a few more things I want to do to prepare, but even if they don't get done, we're ready for Monday at least.

This year, Noelle is going to be attending a 2-day per week tutorial. She will do her social studies and science through her tutorial, while I concentrate on her language arts, math, Bible and any art or music I want to do with her at home. It was a hard decision whether or not to send her to this program this year; however, with a new baby on the way (coupled with the difficult time I had after Betsy's birth), this is a good fit for our family for this year. And, she's so excited ... lunch boxes and school supply lists are delighting her to pieces right now. She won't start her tutorial work until later in the month, but we're going to go ahead and start our portion next week to give us some buffer days for baby's birth.

For her language arts program this year, I decided to go with several of the resources offered by Peace Hill Press and put together by the author of The Well-Trained Mind, Susan Wise Bauer. We are choosing to continue with our classical approach to learning and I have been most impressed with what I've looked at so far. 

For math, we are going to continue with Saxon and I really like the look of their first grade materials. In retrospect, I think their kindergarten program would have been better suited for Noelle as pre-K and beginning K material, so I'll be doing a little of that with Natalie this year as she has interest. I'm not on any time-table with her as far as pre-K material I want to cover. She is just very interested in learning to read and write this year and so I've got a few little things for her to do as it fits for both her and me. 

Bible will just be a continuation of what we have been working on from last year - continuing to read through the Catherine Vos Children's Story Bible, making those stories familiar to her. We'll also do memory work through Awana, and she will have a short chapel program with her tutorial once a week. For first grade, I think that's plenty.

For her social studies and science (the two subjects covered by her tutorial), she will be spending time studying Ancient Civilization (creation up through the Greeks) and earth sciences. Because I am a geeky once-upon-a-time history major, I went ahead and purchased Story of the World, Volume 1 for my reading (and probably for some read-aloud time) so that I can learn along with her. This was the social studies curriculum that I had planned on using this year had we not gone with the tutorial so that makes me happy that it will still fit and we can use it.

Edited to add: We found out this week that they are bumping her social studies rotation back one year. Instead, this year she will be studying American History and Tennessee History from the early 1800's to the present. That is actually fine with me - we have some Little House on the Prairie books to finish this year and this will fit perfectly with this!

I think that's first grade in a nutshell! : ) I'm hoping to throw in a few Download N Go studies over these first few weeks to get us back into our school routine. We really enjoyed those over our kindergarten year and I think starting off with one will be a good transition for us. For our first week, we are going to spend some time visiting China, and after that, I think we will spend time doing a fun summer one. (I was sent a copy of Summer Sensations to review and give away on the blog so we'll roll that into our second week of school.) I also am dreaming of few holiday inspired lapbooks for this year around Thanksgiving and Christmas. There are just so many options - it's easy to get excited and carried away!