Title: Good Faith (Stewart Realty, #8)

Author: Liz Crowe

Genre: Family Saga, Fiction

Release Date: June 8, 2021

Cover Designer: Buoni Amici Press

Publisher: Buoni Amici Press

Hosted by: Buoni Amici Press, LLC.

 

 

 

Brandis Gordon struggles to maintain control as he ricochets between wild success and miserable failure as an energetic boy, an athletic teen, and young adult, proving time and again how even the strongest relationships can be strangled by the ties that bind.

Blair Freitag spent her entire life in close contact with her family’s friends, the Gordons. But when her obsession with the boy who at one time was nothing but a teasing nuisance, blossoms into a strength of will that Brandis comes to depend on a little too much, all bets are off.

 

A chronicle of three families navigating teen years minefields, into the turbulence of young adulthood, Good Faith holds up a mirror to contemporary life, unflinchingly reflecting life’s joys and temptations. Somewhere between the tangle of good memories and bad, independence and addiction, optimism and despair, the intertwined destinies of the new Stewart Realty generation collide, leaving some stronger, others broken, but none unscathed.

AMAZON

 

 

 

 

Liz Crowe is a Kentucky native and graduate of the University of Louisville living in Central Illinois. She's spent her time as a three-continent expat trailing spouse, mom of three, real estate agent, brewery owner and bar manager, and is currently a social media consultant and humane society development director, in addition to being an award-winning author. With stories set in the not-so-common worlds of breweries, on the soccer pitch, inside fictional television stations and successful real estate offices, and even in exotic locales like Istanbul, Turkey, her books are compelling and told with a fresh voice. The Liz Crowe backlist has something for any reader seeking complex storylines with humor and complete casts of characters that will delight, at times frustrate, and always linger in the imagination long after the book is finished.

 

Start the series by reading books 1-7

AMAZON | AppleBooks | Nook | Kobo

 

 

Fascinating story.

This is another one of those books where I don't think my review could ever do the book itself justice. It was that flipping good. Liz Crowe have us a little bit of everything with this book, leaving me an emotional mess when I finally got to the last page.

Good Faith is a journey through the lives of the couples that we've met through the Stewart Realty series. We get a glimpse into their lives as couples, but more importantly we follow their children from their pre-teens through to adult their adult years.

Brandis Gordon, Gabriel and Blair Frietag and Lillian Grace Anderson are grow up together. Fight together and learn the true value of friendship and love. Their circle isn't an easy one to follow, but Liz Crowe does a fabulous job of portraying the peaks and valleys of relationships. The four has some incredible highs and lows, but it seemed they were always there for each other, even when they didn't like one another.

I enjoyed all the characters, but Brandis was one that I still think about. Brandis was a character that ran you through the gamut of emotions. But even when he was bad and you wanted to shake him, he'd say or do something and I'd be ready to forgive him. I could sympathize with Blair with the way she always took him back, because I knew I would. Brandis was very complex and had issues, but he was a good person who needed to get a wake up call to straighten out. The one he got was harsh and terribly heartbreaking, but it was what he needed in the end.

This is definitely a book I highly recommend you pick up (You don't need to have read the Stewart Realty series). Liz Crowe created something very special with this story and it is one, despite being a mess when it was over, that I will definitely be re-reading again.

A book about 1980s real estate boondoggles. It could have been interesting. It wasn't.

Jane Smiley's writing is very good (she is a Pulitzer prize winner), and even though I was bored listening to this audiobook, waiting for something interesting to happen (nothing really does, until the very end, and what does happen is inevitable), I noted the difference between a real Writer, a literary Writer, a Writer who has mastered her craft, and one who's passably good, who can tell a tale, but has neither complete mastery of prose nor of characterization and plotting. Jane Smiley does; all of her characters are completely, totally real, acting like completely real, believable, complicated people in a story that is completely real and believable.

The problem with believable real-life stories and real-life people is that they're boring. Between Good Faith and some cheesy zombie apocalypse written by a hack, I'm afraid that while Good Faith might earn you more literary karma points for reading it, the zombie apocalypse is definitely more fun to read.

Part of the problem is the protagonist: Joe Stratford is the very definition of an average Joe. He's a realtor who sells nice houses to nice people and he's a nice guy. Okay, he's also having an affair with a married woman, but nobody's perfect. He gets caught up in the real estate fever of the early 80s, sweet-talked into a partnership by a former IRS agent who believes rules were meant to be creatively reinterpreted. So a bunch of people get greedy and stupid and you can see the disaster coming a mile away, but there's hardly any drama because Joe is just such a swell, ordinary fellow, he hardly gets worked up about anything. We get a lot of internal monologues and a fair number of sex scenes and a ton of details about real estate and S&Ls.

For Smiley's skill as a writer, I am giving this book 3 stars, though really there have been 2-star books that I enjoyed no less. It might have just been that this particular story did not interest me. I will probably try one of her other novels, someday, but I'll be more choosy about the one I try.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from this book, but I don'’t think it was what I found, at least in terms of its structure. What Good Is God? In Search of a Faith That Matters is a collection of talks that Philip Yancey has given in various places around the world, each prefaced with a chapter reflecting on the circumstances under which they were given.

In some instances, Yancey addressed communities in the wake of traumatic events; in others, he spoke to groups who were marginalized and persecuted. He spoke in Memphis, Tennessee - a place I know pretty well, and one where nearly every issue is quite literally black or white - on the day after the 2008 presidential election, discussing the healing influence that the Church Health Center has had on this city with a notorious civil-rights history. He talked in South Africa about how the country'’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has approached its mission. He brought survivors of the Columbine shootings with him to a talk at Virginia Tech just after it suffered its own similar tragedy, knowing that they'’d be able to reach each other as few could. He spoke at a Cambridge University conference about C.S. Lewis, and that chapter may have been the one I least expected; it actually made me want to read C.S. Lewis’ writings on Christianity.

Yancey was brought up in a narrow-minded, fundamentalist church, but has arrived at a more expansive worldview - and God-view, which is what he communicates to his listeners. He comes across as evangelical in some ways, but with a rather non-sectarian approach, and the more time I spent with the book, the more appealing I found that. He takes a pretty strong stand against what he calls “legalism,” or the excessive focus on “rules” about the “proper” way to believe and express one'’s faith that often seems to lead to “"my Christianity is better than your Christianity"” competitiveness - not especially Christian behavior, in my opinion. In contrast, he seeks to convey what Christianity is by going back to its roots, the teachings of Jesus and writings of his early followers.

Despite some redundancies that I think are at least partly the fault of the book'’s structure, I think that Yancey does a pretty effective job of getting his Christian worldview across to his readers and listeners; I rarely felt that I was being preached at, and I was surprised to find that I shared some of the viewpoints he expressed. I’'m not sure that what’'s presented in this book truly matches the premise of its title, however. “In Search of a Faith That Matters” implies, to me, a personal faith journey in some form, and that’s really not what’'s chronicled here. On top of that, the central question “What Good is God?” really doesn'’t seem to be answered. I’'m not uncomfortable with that, personally - as I'’ve said before, the questions are what interest me - but I do think that some readers might feel a bit misled. Having said that, I’'m not sorry I read this one, and it's left me with some real food for thought.