Lisa J. Lickel

Lisa Lickel’s Innocent’s Pray directly takes on controversial topics by getting to the heart of the matter. With deep, well-developed characters, she explores the emotional consequences of death, suffering, and sacrifice. Lickel makes bold choices in telling her story and they fit well to create tension and keep you reading. At times, the story is written in third person and other times it is told first person in the journal of a woman dying from cancer. Lickel further engages the reader by telling the story in her son’s confirmation journal. In these passages, Lickel takes on the doubts most Christians have throughout their spiritual life. Lickel adds a further twist by progresses her story through an online message board. The character participating in the forum is a mystery and we, as readers, must piece his identity together.
The novel has three great story lines that intertwine realistically. Each one kept me turning the pages to see what happens. Each character is like-able and yet handles things poorly at times. In other words, Lickel represents real life well. As the title implies, it is an inspirational story (read religious). Something I have not read to a great extent. However, I found this story to be a great story about people of faith. They rely on faith and prayer. However, many mainstream works forget that real people do have faith. The events of the story unfold as a story. Not as a parable.
Well, perhaps it can be a parable as Lickel takes on controversial topics. However, it is a well-written one and it is up for the reader to decide the message. This book is described as book one in the Paradise House Series and I look forward to reading the next.
… (lisätietoja)

Leah, once a foster child, takes on a job at the Rocking J Ranch in Wyoming cooking for cowboys. It’s a place to stay until spring. She doesn’t trust horses and she has no intention of making any deep connections with anyone. She never has. Then Noel arrives. He’s the son who never liked the ranch and intends to sell it to a developer, but after a business deal gone bad he has no place else to go. He believes he’s no better than the Prodigal Son. Still, the familiar rhythm of life at the ranch grows on him. Old memories, and Leah, tug at his emotions until the joy of Christmas takes hold in Noel once again.
This gentle, but complex romance was a wonderful read and highly recommended.… (lisätietoja)

Lisa Lickel has done it again. She’s crafted another novel with a unique concept and characters as interesting and troubling as the concept itself. Innocents Pray asks the question, if four people are praying for different answers to the same situation, how will God answer all of them?

Lisa’s story is disturbing on several levels – from the woman who goes away to die without telling her family what she’s doing, to the doctor creating his own version of medical ethics, to the son who is described on the back cover as “a whisper from the edge of reason”, to the conflicted hospice chaplain with a connection to each. Each individual is struggling with a huge internal conflict and question for which there is no pat answer, and wondering how the story can possibly end is what keeps us turning the pages. The characters themselves are often not very likeable, yet so real in the ways they are troubled that we care for them in their brokenness.

Lisa tends to write from a variety of interesting points of view, which creates a much more fascinating web than if this story had only been written from the viewpoints of, say, the MC who has cancer or Able, the hospice chaplain whose integrity is at odds with what he is being asked to do. She deftly goes between their points of view in first person, third person, and from a mysterious interchange on a weblog that keeps us guessing as to who is hosting and playing devil’s advocate on the site.

I would view Innocents Pray as a both literary and experimental women’s fiction, and Lisa is up to the task of presenting it to her readers. If there is anything critical, it would be that there was a time or two I felt slightly uncertain if I was understanding a particular relationship (near the end) clearly (that might have been me).

Intriguing on an eerily realistic level!

… (lisätietoja)

Lisa Lickel captured my attention big time with her themes in Meander Scar, a contemporary novel from Black Lyon Publishing involving an older woman still married to her missing husband, and the much younger man who's come into her life.

Ann Ballard is stuck in limbo. She's not a widow, and she's not feeling very married either. She doesn't know if she's been abandoned or if something terrible happened to her husband who's been estranged now for seven years. What she does know is that her mother-in-law controls her husband's business which has Ann's future tied, and a man has come back to town -- a much younger man named Mark Roth who used to be a next-door neighbor friend of her son's -- and he's been carrying a torch for Ann since he was barely out of high school.

Of course, no one in Ann's world, especially her son, her sister, or her husband's mother would approve of a relationship between them. And does Ann? She's not sure. All she knows is that she has deep scars. Scars that only love can heal.

But there's a mystery here, too. What did happen to Ann's husband, and what will happen when she finds out?

Ms. Lickel used a deft hand in taking on this edgy, taboo subject, layering the story in weavings of mystery as the heroine tries to discover the truth about her husband, and desire as the younger man, now a successful attorney, makes his love and longing for her known. There are no easy solutions, which made the story a romantic and realistic read. And... the ending took me by surprise!… (lisätietoja)