Need You now

    By Beth Wiseman

This is Beth Wiseman's first non-amish fiction book. While I wanted to love it, since I am a big Beth Wiseman fan, I didn't. It's a good book, but to me it lacks the spark that Beth Wiseman's books usually have.
The basic story is that a city family moves to the country, in an attempt to separate their children from some undesirable situations. (A son with bad friends, a daughter with boyfriend troubles)Once they settle into their fixer upper, they find that trouble can't be outrun so easily.
Darlene, the main character, is the mother of 3 children who finds herself wishing for a job outside the home in order to make some new friends and feel a little more "independent." Her husband isn't overly fond of the idea, but wants his wife to be happy and tries to support her desire to work. From this point, the family begins to fall apart. Their son engages in questionable behaviors, their middle daughter develops a dangerous addiction, and secrets between husband and wife threaten the very fabric of the family.
Unfortunately I found many of the characters a bit flat, and some almost unnecessary. (Many barely got "fleshed out" so to speak)The husband is almost an afterthought through much of the book, as is the youngest child. A side story about a neighbor is mostly a distraction. The husband blames the family's troubles on the wife working outside of the home, the wife blames the husband for working too many hours...Too many problems pop up, one after another, until the story gets far too spread out, wandering all over the place. In the end, many of the loose ends don't really get addressed, and the neighbor is suddenly a focal point, distracting from the main story about the family.
I still give the book 4 stars, as it was a good read. However, I usually cannot tear myself away from a Beth Wiseman book until it's finished. This book did not quite inspire that feeling. It was a good read, but it was nothing like Beth Wiseman's usual writing. The characters didn't feel as "real" which is a departure from the usual, since Beth's Amish characters often seem so real, that the reader forgets that they don't know them in person. I do think that it would be wonderful if Beth continued to write non-Amish Christian fiction, but I hope that future novels have more of the "Wiseman spark" that was missing from this one.