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Rating: 
Summary: Copper Hill
Review: A good read for those who enjoy humor and adventure and entertaining interplay of relationships in a husband-wife writing team. The unique setting of Jerome, Arizona, the town sliding down a hill, with its idiosyncratic characters, provide Tony & Price Shadowbrook a crazy summer of research while keeping up with their own family's antics.
Rating: 
Summary: A great book about family, marriage and God!
Review: I really enjoyed this book. A husband and wife writing team spend the summer in Arizona writing a book. It tells of the struggles and joys of marriage and raising a family while looking for God's guidance. And some interesting stuff happens during their book-writing summer. I hope they continue this series. It's good to read a book that puts family and marriage in a positive light.
Rating: 
Summary: A failed cocktail of marriage, menopause, mystery and murder
Review: The only reason I read this book is because I got it in a discount bundle of books from a Christian bookstore. Now I know why they were trying to get rid of it. The story line revolves around a husband and wife who team up to write books about their travels. If you haven't read the first book in the series, the relationships between the characters can be hard to figure out. For the record, the main characters are Tony and (Dr) Priscilla (Price) Shadowbrook. The Shadowbrooks have two daughters, twins Kathy and Christina (Kit), and two sons, Mark (married to Amanda and father of Cooper) and Josh (engaged to Melody). In this volume, the Shadowbrooks visit Jerome, an old Arizona copper mining town. The intriguing beginning immediately arouses interest, as they bump into an eccentric traveller carrying his own tombstone - marked with the approaching date of his death! But aside from the last two chapters - which contain an exciting and suspenseful concoction of murder and mystery - the book really doesn't live up to its early promise. Most of the content revolves around the Shadowbrooks and the book about Jerome they are working on. After a while, it dawned on me that the book the Shadowbrooks are producing was the very one in my hands! It sounds like a novel idea, but the novelty soon wears thin. After reading sentences like "Can we use any of that scene in our book?" for the fourth time (p.165), I began thinking: "Just get on with the book!" It soon gets a bit tiresome to hear the husband and wife writing team arguing about a suitable title, deciding what events to incorporate, and giving each other kudos for their brilliant writing in the previous chapter. The fictional Shadowbrook is supposedly a famous writer, having ardent fans constantly bow at his feet, and is mentioned in the same breath as Clancy and Grisham (p.168). But Copper Hill makes it painfully evident that Bly is no Clancy and no Grisham! But I suspect the real Bly and the fictional Shadowbrook have a great deal in common. Can it be a coincidence that both Bly and Shadowbrook are writers of Westerns? That they have authored books with the same title? That the Shadowbrook husband and wife team are writing a book about Jerome called Copper Hill, just like the Bly husband and wife team? The connections between the Shadowbrooks and the Blys are too strong to be ignored. Secretly I wondered how much of the Shadowbrook's marriage and family is simply a reflection of the Bly's own life, particularly because a great deal of the book concerns the ins and outs of a marriage relationship hampered by menopause and trivial family squabbles. In this respect Copper Hill did have the potential to give a solid message about marriage and the family. But any positive message is sadly cheapened by the frivolousness of the conflicts. A mother of the bride who suddenly decides she's opposed to a backyard wedding, convinces herself that wedding rings are pagan symbols, and wants to add a train to the wedding dress - all just days before the wedding? Puh-lease! When will the silliness stop? Of course it does stop in the last two chapters when the murder mystery really heats up, but by that time it is really too late. Hampered further by some questionable theology about spiritual warfare (p.34 & 155), and a lack of courage in applying Biblical absolutes (p.68-72), this book is in the end a rather unfortunate disappointment. On its own, the cocktail of mystery and murder had the potential to be a winner. But when combined with a watered down mix of marriage and menopause, the final cocktail sadly turned sour.
Rating:
Summary: A failed cocktail of marriage, menopause, mystery and murder
Review: The only reason I read this book is because I got it in a discount bundle of books from a Christian bookstore. Now I know why they were trying to get rid of it. The story line revolves around a husband and wife who team up to write books about their travels. If you haven't read the first book in the series, the relationships between the characters can be hard to figure out. For the record, the main characters are Tony and (Dr) Priscilla (Price) Shadowbrook. The Shadowbrooks have two daughters, twins Kathy and Christina (Kit), and two sons, Mark (married to Amanda and father of Cooper) and Josh (engaged to Melody). In this volume, the Shadowbrooks visit Jerome, an old Arizona copper mining town. The intriguing beginning immediately arouses interest, as they bump into an eccentric traveller carrying his own tombstone - marked with the approaching date of his death! But aside from the last two chapters - which contain an exciting and suspenseful concoction of murder and mystery - the book really doesn't live up to its early promise. Most of the content revolves around the Shadowbrooks and the book about Jerome they are working on. After a while, it dawned on me that the book the Shadowbrooks are producing was the very one in my hands! It sounds like a novel idea, but the novelty soon wears thin. After reading sentences like "Can we use any of that scene in our book?" for the fourth time (p.165), I began thinking: "Just get on with the book!" It soon gets a bit tiresome to hear the husband and wife writing team arguing about a suitable title, deciding what events to incorporate, and giving each other kudos for their brilliant writing in the previous chapter. The fictional Shadowbrook is supposedly a famous writer, having ardent fans constantly bow at his feet, and is mentioned in the same breath as Clancy and Grisham (p.168). But Copper Hill makes it painfully evident that Bly is no Clancy and no Grisham! But I suspect the real Bly and the fictional Shadowbrook have a great deal in common. Can it be a coincidence that both Bly and Shadowbrook are writers of Westerns? That they have authored books with the same title? That the Shadowbrook husband and wife team are writing a book about Jerome called Copper Hill, just like the Bly husband and wife team? The connections between the Shadowbrooks and the Blys are too strong to be ignored. Secretly I wondered how much of the Shadowbrook's marriage and family is simply a reflection of the Bly's own life, particularly because a great deal of the book concerns the ins and outs of a marriage relationship hampered by menopause and trivial family squabbles. In this respect Copper Hill did have the potential to give a solid message about marriage and the family. But any positive message is sadly cheapened by the frivolousness of the conflicts. A mother of the bride who suddenly decides she's opposed to a backyard wedding, convinces herself that wedding rings are pagan symbols, and wants to add a train to the wedding dress - all just days before the wedding? Puh-lease! When will the silliness stop? Of course it does stop in the last two chapters when the murder mystery really heats up, but by that time it is really too late. Hampered further by some questionable theology about spiritual warfare (p.34 & 155), and a lack of courage in applying Biblical absolutes (p.68-72), this book is in the end a rather unfortunate disappointment. On its own, the cocktail of mystery and murder had the potential to be a winner. But when combined with a watered down mix of marriage and menopause, the final cocktail sadly turned sour.
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