SINCERELY, MAYLA Pack Giveaway Reminder
Don’t forget! Tomorrow is the last day to get your name in for the Mayla Mix! It includes a copy of Virginia Smith’s wonderful book, SINCERELY, MAYLA, a multicolored anklet , a bottle of Sally Hansen’s 10 Day-No Chip Radiant RED nail polish, a couple of those little foam things that separate your toes while you paint them, a Sally Hansen foot rasp (to make your feet all smooth and silky) and I even made a little daisy toe ring (if you really want your feet to match the cover of the book). There’s even a cute little matching zippered bag to put everything in!
How can you get in on the drawing? Post a comment to my May 14th post, May 13th post, and/or by subscribing to my newsletter. (You can even do all three!)
Now all those little things are cute, but the thing I’d really like you to get if you win this pack is the message in Virginia’s book: that being a Christian doesn’t mean that you have to be conventional. God loves us “just as we are.” We are saved by the precious sacrifice that Christ made for us. And it’s up to our Father, through the Holy Spirit, to convict us and lead us in the way we should go. Amen? Amen!
Ok, I’m through preaching now. 
Embrace Me by Lisa Samson
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 Lexinton, 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, ahs 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
