Reviewer Conny Withay:Operating her own business in office management since 1991, Conny is an avid reader and volunteers with the elderly playing her designed The Write Word Game. A cum laude graduate with a degree in art living in the Pacific Northwest, she is married with two sons, two daughters-in-law, and three grandchildren.
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Author: Gina Holmes
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers,
Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-4143-6641-8
“I dreamed I had stained-glass wings just like her. I kept flapping them with all my might, but my feet wouldn’t leave the ground. I was about to give up when I noticed the vine wrapped around my ankle.” Penny acknowledges in Gina Homes’ Christian novel, Wings of Glass.
With three hundred and
seventy-one pages, this paperback book depicts a huge beautiful
butterfly with a young woman behind it, hugging herself as she walks
down the middle of railroad tracks on the front cover. The back cover
gives a few paragraphs about the book, two reviews, and the author’s
biography with a photograph. At end of the book inside, there are
author notes with information about abuse hotlines and materials.
Although there is no profanity or questionable sex scenes, the
subject matter of spousal abuse and alcoholism may not be suitable
for immature teenagers or younger. This reader wishes all pronouns
regarding God were capitalized.
Bestselling author Holmes writes in first person of Penny, a very young, sheltered and somewhat naïve married woman who finds out she is pregnant after years of trying. However, there is one major obstacle in her life: the husband she loves and adores yet fears and is afraid of is not only an alcoholic but repeatedly physically and emotionally abuses her. After each tragic episode, she forgives, ignores and denies the abuse, enabling the sad situation further.
When her husband becomes
temporarily blind from a work-related job, Penny is forced to take a
job cleaning houses, where she meets two extraordinary women with
heart-breaking backgrounds of their own to share. With both women
being Christians and their love deepens for Penny, the young girl is
at a cross-road deciding if she should Biblically leave her husband.
When given a winged angel statue, Penny tries to correlate her own
life behind the artwork’s symbolism.
Yet after her spouse comes
home drunk again and there is a murder of a woman he worked with,
Penny is forced to choose between her fear-based silence and
escaping, taking her newborn son to safety. As she writes letters to
her son, one sees the angst, anger, and frustration of not only the
physical abuse but the emotional and spiritual turmoil.
The book states in the beginning from Ecclesiastes 4:12, “A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.” NLT. Holmes does an excellent job weaving the strong cord of friendship that helps the heroine turn to God and decide what to do next.