Delores Liesner
Activating Faith in everyday life
Review – The Song of Sadie Sparrow
$15.99 Paperback $2.99 | Format: Kindle | Page Count: 398
This book should appeal to any who are approaching retirement years, in retirement years, have family members at an age where they need help with their care, or have been, are, or might be a caregiver. The story is as varied as life – humor, passion, mystery, hope and drama.
The main characters are three women of different ages:
Sadie an 86-year-old widow placed in The Hickories nursing home by her overly busy career-minded daughter.
Meg, a recent widow at 58, has closed down her home business, works at The Hickories and is an agnostic. Meg’s favorite part of her job is to write biographies of the residents.
Elise, a 32-year-old is emotionally wounded by her mother’s desertion. She quit her teaching job to care for the grandfather who raised her and who now lives at Hickories. Elise attends a class on how to build a website about heaven. www.EverlastingPlace.com is a real website written by the author.
Making the story interesting are Elise’s father and Jamie a young pastor hosting a Bible study which at first has only one attendee – Sadie Sparrow. Jamie also develops a relationship with Elise, an answer to prayer for Elise’s grandfather.
Sadie and some best friends in Hickories share humor, suspicions, questions, and concerns that bring up many topics of caregiving, end of life and the importance of being heard. Meg’s character apparently derives in part from the author’s early personal life. (see synopsis and author bio below).
Don’t assume a story set in a nursing home would be slow and only have sadness. I have friends in assisted living and know what a soap opera their world is. Consequently I opened the book with anticipation and loved the way each character experienced the cover challenge ‘It’s never too late to change your tune’. Appropriately every character’s experience was affected by the Song of Sadie Sparrow. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.
Sadie Sparrow, Meg Vogel and Elise Chapelle represent different generations. They have experienced different sorrows and entertain different hopes. They even adhere to different worldviews, from devoutly Christian to unapologetically atheist. Yet over the course of a single year, they forge unlikely bonds that impact each other’s lives in the here and now—and perhaps for all eternity.
A beautifully written story of friendship set against the backdrop of life’s twilight years, The Song of Sadie Sparrow explores contrasting views of purpose and pardon, life and afterlife—and faith’s role in shaping those views, now and forevermore.
Kitty Foth-Regner was a feminist atheist for the first half of her adult life—until her Christian mother stood on the cusp of eternity, sending Kitty off on a personal quest for the truth about where we came from, what we’re doing here and where we’re going. Heaven Without Her (Thomas Nelson, 2008) is an enthusiastically endorsed account of that quest, during which she frantically sought evidence for everything but Christianity (since she thought most Christians were both boring and self-righteous). Finding no such evidence, she finally turned to the Bible, and was blown away by its obvious truth, and by learning that all her long-held ideas about Christians had been 100% wrong.Kitty is also the co-author, with Amy Ammen, of Hip Ideas for Hyper Dogs (Wiley/Howell, 2007), a contributor to Transformed by the Evidence (Leafcutter Press, 2014), and editor ofGod’s Glory in Clay Pots (Word for Life Publishing, 2009). Her first published book was a medical thriller entitled The Cure (Main Street Publishing, 1987), chosen winner of the first Greater Milwaukee Book Festival Contest by the late mystery novelist Sue Grafton.
A retired copywriter with scores of brochures, white papers and scripts in her portfolio, today Kitty is a 60-hour-a-month nursing-home volunteer at the facility where her mother lived and died. A reflection of her experiences there, The Song of Sadie Sparrow is a novel celebrating three women, representing three different generations and worldviews, who meet in a nursing home and impact each other’s lives—perhaps for all eternity.
I received a free copy of this book to review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the FTC Regulations. I am part of The CWA Review Crew.
Be the Miracle! – with journaling pages
Delores Liesner: Author
American Christian Fiction Writers Association
Delores Liesner 