This week, the

Christian Fiction Blog Alliance

is introducing

Embrace Me

(Thomas Nelson March 4, 2008)

by

Lisa Samson

Lisa Samson is a Christy Award-winning author of 19 books, including the Women of the Faith Novel of the Year, Quaker Summer. Lisa has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as “a talented novelist who isn’t afraid to take risks.”

In Embrace Me, the latest novel by acclaimed author Lisa Samson, readers are privy to the realization that regardless of outward appearances…hideous, attractive, or even ordinary…persons are all looking for the same things: love, forgiveness, and redemption.

This story explores a world that is neither comfortable nor safe, a world that people like Valentine know all too well. Masterfully crafted by Samson and populated by her most compelling cast of characters yet. It is a tale of forgiveness that extends into all spheres of life: forgiving others, forgiving oneself, forgiving the past.

She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and three kids.

Biting and gentle, hard-edged and hopeful…a beautiful fable of love and power, hiding and seeking, woundedness and redemption.

When a “lizard woman,” a self-mutilating preacher, a tattooed monk, and a sleazy lobbyist find themselves in the same North Carolina town one winter, their lives are edging precariously close to disaster…and improbably close to grace.

Valentine, due to her own drastic self-disfigurement, has very few friends in this world and, it appears as if she may be destined to spend the rest of her life practically alone. But life gives her one good friend, Lella, whose own handicap puts her in the same freakish category as Valentine. As part of Roland’s Wayfaring Marvel and Oddities Show, a traveling band of misfits, they seem to have found their niches in an often curiously cruel world.

Residing in a world where masks are mandatory, Valentine has a hard time removing hers, because of her disfigured face but more so because of her damaged soul. It is much easier for her to listen endlessly to different versions of a favorite song, Embraceable You, and escape reality. Yet, life has more in store for her when she meets Augustine, replete with the tattoos, dreadlocks, and his own secrets. With his arrival, Valentine’s soul takes a turn.

If you would like to read the first chapter, go HERE.

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Well, we are about to venture into high school. I’m trying to map out our course schedule for the fall but this requires me to really map out some sort of schedule for the next four years. In order to gain the credits we’d like our daughter to have, I have to plan what she will take each year. One thing that I hadn’t thought of was physical education. At some point in high school, our daughter will need one credit. One credit is 150 hours of physical education. Today I’ve been racking my brain to try and figure out what we’ll do for that. I know one family whose son got into juggling and that was his PE. He became quite good at juggling and even performed locally. That’s another cool thing about homeschooling. We can choose some form of PE that breaks out of the traditional box. When I was in high school, we were required to take “gym” for three years. We did things like played kickball, basketball, and running. I liked it because I was an athlete but many girls hated it. They didn’t like to play kickball, basketball, dodge ball, or to run. Our daughter is the same way. She doesn’t care for many of those games. So, we are on a mission to learn a unique skill for PE. I think it would be fun to learn how to walk on stilts. I even found these cool stilts we could order! They are relatively inexpensive and we’d have a blast learning.

If stilt walking bombs, we could try something a little more difficult. Both sides of our family are Scottish so maybe we could learn to toss a caber, although I’m thinking we’d have to grow (A LOT) in order to do that. LOL! How about your family? What have you done to fill your PE credit? I would love to find something really unique to do. After all, we are supposed to devote 150 hours to this :-o)