Best this month
By Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat Tiger Eyes Davey Wexler (Willa Holland) is a 17-year-old girl whose
beloved father was killed during a holdup of his convenience store in Atlantic City, N.J. Her mother is immobilized by the loss of her husband and decides to visit her older sister in Los Alamos, N.M., the birthplace of the atomic bomb. When Davey’s mother starts taking pills all the time and sleep- ing, the sister and brother-in-law try to become surrogate parents. However, this free-thinking teenager spurns their counsel and turns instead to Wolf (Tatanka Means), a sen- sitive and caring Native American, and his father (Russell Means), a cancer patient. Tiger Eyes offers a poignant depiction of Davey’s grief
and the support and wisdom she receives from Wolf and his father. The Native American community uses rituals to heal the wounds of separation, and Davey finds her own way of saying goodbye to her father in a ritual of loving closure (Freestyle Releasing, PG-13—thematic material including a violent incident, some teen drinking). Now on DVD.
My Blue Is Happy Jessica Young begins this delicious children’s
book with “My sister says that blue is sad like a lonely song.” But the narrator says, “My blue is happy like my favorite jeans and a splash in the pool on a hot day.” There are different strokes for different folks as far as colors that appeal to them or turn them off. The little girl’s mother sees yellow as cheery. Her father sees brown as ordinary.
One of the marvels of life is that the intensity, Author bio:
The Brussats publish the website www.SpiritualityandPractice. com where you can find more information about the items reviewed in this column.
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www.thelutheran.org
variety, beauty and uniqueness of creation can be experienced in simple things—like colors. Young has written a children’s picture book that we read with unmixed delight. It has been designed for boys and girls from 4 through 8 years old (Candlewick Press,
www.Candlewick.com).
Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
Francis Spufford is a fellow
at the Royal Society of Litera- ture and teaches at Goldsmiths College in London. In this book, which was published to great acclaim in England, he offers a spunky and creative defense of Christianity that has been battered and bruised lately by attacks from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, a journalist and debator.
Spufford doesn’t try to defend everything associated
with the faith. He is reluctant to cover the concept of hell, the ennobling potential of suffering or the existence of eternal life. But he believes that “humanity glimmers with God’s presence” and feels deeply connected with Jeshua, the first-century Jew who modeled our respon- sibility to do all we can to mend the world. For a spirited defense of the Christian path, read this book (Harper- One,
www.HarperCollins.com).
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