Part 1: Adoption Fiction Book Review: Beyond the Blue


Part 2: A Chat with Author, Leslie Gould


Part 3: More chit-chat with Author, Leslie Gould

In Part 1 of this series, I reviewed Leslie Gould’s adoption-themed novel, Beyond the Blue. I enjoyed the story so thoroughly that I could hardly wait to read Leslie’s newest release, Scrap Everything.

I’m not a scrapbooker and perhaps that’s why Scrap Everything didn’t capture my interest the way Beyond the Blue did. Or maybe it’s because I read Scrap Everything late at night when I was stressed out over my own book deadline. But I just couldn’t seem to connect with the characters in this book. They felt flat and the plot crawled, rather than galloped (even though horse-riding was a regular feature of the novel).

The story line chronicles two families who have recently moved to tiny Forest Falls, Oregon. Elise and Ted and their teen sons, Mark and Michael, move to Forest Falls because it’s Ted’s hometown. He loves Forest Falls. The rest of the family longs to live in Portland.

Trouble brews when Ted (an Army medic with only two years left to serve in the inactive reserves) agrees to be deployed to Iraq. Elise, stuck in the role of single parent to two teenage boys, is not happy with Ted’s decision.

Enter Rebekah, Patrick, and their 12-year-old daughter and teenage son. Rebekah owns the local scrapbooking store, a place of refuge and rejuvenation for many of the local women.

Rebekah and Patrick face a major crisis with their daughter Pepper, who arrived in their family as a 3-month old foster child and at age 8, was diagnosed with kidney disease.

The plot revolves around Pepper’s increasingly life-threatening disease, Elise’s difficulties in parenting two rebellious teen boys on her own, and the tentative friendship Elise and Rebekah form, with scrapbooking as the impetus for their friendship.

While I enjoyed Scrap Everything, I believe that Beyond the Blue is a stronger novel, with more intriguing characters and plot.

If you’d like to read excerpts from Scrap Everything and a review from a professional scrapbooker’s angle, visit Tasra Dawson’s blog, Real Women Scrap. Tasra offers some interesting insights about the themes of faith and friendship in Scrap Everything.


In the next post: Author Leslie Gould’s Adoption Story