Book Review - Stray Affections

Stray Affections
Charlene Baumbich
WaterBrook Press (September 15, 2009)

In short: Filled with emotion, this character driven novel will be welcomed by the right audience looking for an inspirational “shoulder to cry on”.

I do not think I am the target audience for this book.

However, I volunteered to review the book and thus I will. I really don’t know what came over me but I have made a commitment – and I will follow through.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this is a bad book, I’m just saying it obviously isn’t for me. There are some concerns for anyone, which I will note, but for the right audience I can see where this would be an inspirational and uplifting read. I need a little bit more…shall we say…action? No, that isn’t exactly it because I like a lot of books that aren’t driven by their plot. Maybe it is a gender thing, but this novel was just too…”soft”? There were a lot of emotions flying around here. Examining your feelings was an important part of the character development. A lot of those feelings were “hurt feelings”. I felt like I had landed in the middle of a therapy session. Come on ladies, get over it! (Sorry, it just came out.)

Cassandra, a mother of four young boys, is mesmerized by a snowglobe that she finds at a collectors convention. The object, mystically, prompts a novel length exploration of the relationship with her deceased grandfather, a stray dog she cared for as a child and, most importantly, the strained relationship with her mother, Betty.

Cassandra’s small town life adds a little excitement, and complications, to these explorations of her psyche.

“The downside to living in a small town was there was no such thing as anonymity or hidden error.”

A key part of Cassandra’s emotional healing involves her mother’s widowed friend, Burt Burt. Yes, same first name as last name. Burt Burt is a rock in a sea of sensitivity – although he does have his moments too.

“Eventually, he realized that sometimes a person had to come to grips with his own loneliness – to make peace with it – before he could try to pawn it off or fill it up with someone else. In the last year, there’d been a couple of widows who frequented the shop, putting a few moves on him, but he’d not been inclined to reciprocate.”

Near the end of the book my concerns hit their tipping point as one of the main characters explained her growth with God over the past few chapters. She describes a loving God,

“…not just a judgmental God who thundered around waiting to damn a person to eternal hell.”

This clarified the whole novel to me. God is not waiting to damn a person to eternal Hell. An overemphasis on one characteristic of God leads to a mischaracterization of the whole of God, which can lead to a focus on the emotional, and the mystical. I think it can also lead to a focus on signs, dreams, fleeces and “hearing the voice of God”, which are all prominent in this novel. Please don’t misunderstand me again. The God of the Bible is loving. He cares about our relationships. He is also just and Holy however, and characterizing Him as loving without an equal emphasis on his other characteristics actually diminishes the true character of His loving-kindness.

To learn more about the book or pick up a copy visit here.

Rating: Avoid