Come Find Me, by Ruth Waring (Word Alive Press, 2010)
In 1939, rejected because of their conversion to Christianity, thirteen-year-old Evlyna Cohen’s family left a thriving orthodox Jewish community in Toronto, Canada, to start over where no-one knew them. The Cohens became the Crawfords and hid their ethnic background so they’d be welcome among the Gentiles.
Come Find Me opens in 1964 with Evelyn Sherwood, now a widow with a teenage daughter. Evelyn’s Jewish heritage is only one of the secrets she keeps buried. She has never forgiven her parents for their choice, nor will she forgive their God.
Her late husband and their daughter, Lucy, shared a strong faith that helped them love and support Evelyn despite her difficult personality. Now Lucy and Evelyn grieve separately.
It’s tricky to write an engaging novel with an antagonistic lead character, but Ruth Waring pulls it off well. We meet Evelyn on the brink of becoming willing to step out from behind the wall she’s built—or at least to admit she needs to do so. We also meet Lucy, whose hopeful spirit and insights into her mother’s behaviour influence how we view her.
The novel is a heart-warming story of a repressed, embittered woman’s emergence into light and love and into the beginning of a relationship with the God who’s been whispering “Come find Me” for so many years.
It’s a tale of family, faith, community, with a thread of romance, set in small-town Alberta, and its short chapters invite you to read “just one more”.
Ruth Waring is a Canadian author and speaker living in Ontario. You can read an interview with Ruth at the Interviews and Reviews blog, and learn more about Come Find Me on Facebook. The novel is available online and through your local Christian bookstore.
And to think…it all started from an exercise at our writers’ group. Incredible!
Isn’t that amazing? I suppose most novels start from a single germ of an idea, but still this is really cool.