With all my talk about stories, I’m sure it’s obvious that I love to read. There are a handful of authors whose work consistently delights me. Every new release feels like Christmas morning, and reading their back list is like visiting a long-time friend.
Nancy Rue is one of those authors.
I don’t remember now how I encountered my first Nancy Rue novel. I don’t even remember which title it was. (She has written fourteen contemporary women’s novels, and a small library of preteen novels.) As soon as I finished whichever book it was, I wanted to find more of her work.
One of the (many) things I love about Nancy’s stories is that the challenges her characters meet are always utterly believable and also heartbreakingly difficult—and there are no easy answers. She is not afraid to take her characters into some of the hardest places in life, and yet she always does it with deep care, profound truth, and completely realistic hope.
Her main characters are always women who discover their own strength by being taken to the core of their own vulnerability. The through-line in all of her stories is the great freedom to be experienced in being our authentic selves, rather than the self we think the world expects us to be.
Faith is also a common element in each of her stories, but it’s a realistic faith that wrestles with the mystery of the Divine and the aching reality of being human in an imperfect world. Whether the character starts with deep faith, with outright rejection of what they’ve experienced as faith previously, or somewhere in between, they wrestle with their beliefs and with unexpected insights which inevitably bring them to a new kind of faith that has little to do with dogma and religion.
Because of her realistic and compassionate portrayal of the many layers of faith and its various expressions in human experience, I want to highlight a couple of her series here in my blog.
“The Footnotes Collection” is her most recent series, with only the first two of four novels released so far. (I have it on good authority that Book 3 will be released in the foreseeable future, and Book 4 not long after that.) The series features four women writers who, in the beginning, have only a love for writing in common. How they are brought together and what grows from their unlikely companionship is only part of the unfolding story.
The Reluctant Prophet series was released in 2010 – 2012, and remains my favourite of her contemporary women’s fiction. (The Footnotes Collection is a close second.) This series addresses the subject of faith more directly than any of her others, and in such a way that my own understanding of faith and how I live it in into the world was challenged (and re-challenged every time I re-read the series).
I’ll offer more detailed review of both series later this month as part of my “Summer Reading” series on Facebook and Instagram @soulquestservices. If you’re eager to sample Nancy Rue’s storytelling before then, I heartily recommend either The Reluctant Prophet (first book in the series) or either one of the first two in “The Footnotes Collection”—More Than a Footnote or A Mob of Scribbling Women.
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