Middletree

Toward the end of Donald Miller's "Blue Like Jazz", the author mentions Burnside Writers Collective , a website he created with friends, in order to create a web presence for aspiring young Christian writers who tend to be a little Left of Center. While I am neither young nor left of center, I have been privileged to have some of my writing published at BWC. Here's a list: How God Will Use Unimpressive People   The Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 Book Review: Billy Coffey's "When Mockingbirds Sing" God Expresses His Love For Me and Offers to Heal the Wounds of Fatherlessness Why I Voted For Mitt Romney The Value Of the Hurts In Our Lives My Disagreement with Springsteen's "Glory Days" A Lesson I Learned From Little League In addition to those, I have participated in Cross Talk, a series of  discussions in which Emily Timbol (Reaves) and I have talked out our disagreements on important theological/political topics: When I...

Through Thomas Nelson Publishing's Booksneeze program, I obtained a free copy of Billy Coffey's "When Mockingbirds Sing" for review purposes. I'm free to give my honest take on this book. This paragraph is here to make the IRS happy. I started reading Coffey's blog about 2 years ago, and along the way, I read his first two novels, "Snow Day" and "Paper Angels". The former is a nice first effort, while the 2nd is not only an improvement, but with it, he demonstrated an ability to walk the fine line between saying something profound and not trying to sound like he's trying to be profound. "When Mockingbirds Sing" continues in that direction, but the result goes from being merely good to remarkable. The author manages to tell a compelling story that contains important truths without the reader feeling he's being preached to. I've never written a novel, but it seems to me that the difficulty of writing fiction for...