COMING HOME: A STORY OF UNDYING HOPE by Karen Kingsbury

Karen Kingsbury, Coming Home:  A Story of Undying Hope (The Baxter Family) (Zondervan, 2012).

Karen Kingsbury, Coming Home: The Baxter Family, Audiobook read by Gabrielle de Cuir and Stefan Rudnicki (Zondervan.com, 2012)

Also available on Nook and Kindle.

(FICTION)

Reviewed by Wilda Morris

When I was given the CDs of Coming Home: The Baxter Family, I was not familiar with the novels of Karen Kingsbury, although she has been at the top of the charts in the field of Christian fiction. Thus, when I put Coming Home in the CD player in my car, I had no idea that  Kingsbury had featured members of the Baxter family in fourteen previous books (The Redemption Series, The Firstborn Series, and the Sunrise Series). If you think you might like to read or listen to Coming Home, you might want to read the earlier books first. Coming Home is a “stand-alone” book that you can understand without having read the others, but it gives away much of what happens in the earlier volumes.

There was a major problem with listening to Coming Home while I was literally “coming home”—driving from Green Lake, Wisconsin to my home to Illinois: crying and driving are not really compatible activities. The story provides a lot to cry about.

The set-up for Coming Home is that John Baxter is about to celebrate his seventieth birthday. One daughter wants to bring all her siblings and their spouses to her home in Indiana to celebrate with him. She thinks the best gift would be for each of John’s children to write a letter to their dad, telling him what he has meant to them.

As the novel switches focus from one branch of the family to another, old family secrets (revealed in earlier Baxter family novels) come to light in a way that makes me suggest that this book might be considered an epilogue for Kingsbury’s Baxter family books. Each character relives old experiences of joy and loss, and of times they let their father down and found him unwilling to give up on any of them.

The birthday party does not go off as planned, because . . . . well, should I give it away? Let’s just say the books deals with a lot of loss. In addition to the question of why God allows tragedy, the book takes on such issues as jealousy, organ donation, open and closed adoption, sex outside of marriage, forgiveness, and redemption. For all the sorrow in the book, there is also joy. As members of the Baxter family deal with loss, they have their weak moments, but in the end, lean on each other and their shared faith to get through difficult days.

Kingsbury is a best-selling author, beloved (I have since learned) by readers of Christian fiction, and is a highly-regarded speaker. Her book Like Dandelion Dust was made into a major motion picture. Besides the fact that the book kept making me cry, it was a bit preachier than I prefer. There is no question, though, that Kingsbury’s books are well-written and “wholesome.”