Black by Ted Dekker

This was an awesome book! Normally, this is not a book I thought I would be into because it deals with fantasy, but this book was amazing! Its basically about two different realities. In one reality, it is like modern day earth and a virus is on the way of destroying life as we know it. In the other reality, there are evil bats and good bats and colored forests and God in the flesh as a boy. It was just a whirlwind of events and different realities and it is really a wonderful parable of God's love. This is a trilogy so this is only the beginning of this crazy world! The next book is Red and the last book is White. There are also other books that are inter-woven with this trilogy--ten altogether. I absolutely recommend this book to everyone! Its definitely a GREAT parable about God's love and its just a really cool story in general!

House by Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti

This was an amazing book! I've been reading it off and on and finally finished it the first week of January. I have read Frank Peretti before and loved his books about the spiritual worlds, but his collaboration with Ted Dekker brought things even further. Through this book Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker create an amazing thriller that pieces everything together and explains sin in a way that I have never imagined. This book not only gave me nightmares, but a new sense of understanding about sin. Its suspenseful, scary, thrilling, and VERY insightful. In a nutshell, this is a book about 2 couples who end up in an inn in backwoods Alabama to find that they are in a twisted house of horrors. A killer is outside waiting and throws in a tin can with 3 rules. #1 God came into my house and I killed him #2 Anyone who comes into my house will be killed just like I killed God #3 Give me one dead body by dawn and I'll let rule 2 slide. The house changes and forms and reflects their sin in a horrifying way. They find themselves against each other, but what they don't know is that this is a battle against their own selves and their sin. This book is an amazing, and might I add scary, adventure of good and evil and sin and how God saves us from sin. I would totally recommend this book to non-Christians and Christians alike. Christians--this will give you a MUCH deeper understanding of sin. Non-Christians--this will give them a new aspect on sin and God's saving grace.
*This book is now also a major motion picture. It was released November 2008.

“It’s critical that we use a very dark brush to paint evil. When you bring the light into that darkness as characterized in John 1, that light is very vivid. When it dispels the darkness, we see the brilliance that’s there.”--Ted Dekker

“When I sit down to write a novel, I am exploring my own relationship with God, with the struggle between good and evil, my own purpose. My journey is so similar to everyone else’s journey, because we all are human. We all have been defeated by the powers of darkness, and we all find redemption in the light of Christ.”--Ted Dekker

The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks

I finished this book in about 5 days. This was a very easy, relaxing read. The plot is interesting, not very stressful, and, as always, Nicholas Sparks paints a beautiful picture throughout the entire book. Keeping to his style, this is a book about romance and falling in love. It was a fairly realistic tale of a soldier who finds a picture of a woman on the shores in Iraq. The photograph is never claimed by anyone so he puts it in his pocket. He survives many adversaries in Iraq and people begin to call his photo a lucky charm. After he is back in the US, he decides to find the woman and never imagines that his journey would lead him to his destiny and to the woman of his dreams. There is some suspense, but overall I would rate this book as more of an easy-going, relaxing read. I would definitely recommend this book because it is a beautiful tale of love and family.