Title Tuesday: Becoming Gertrude

Welcome to  Title Tuesday, my favorite day of the week! This day is dedicated to book suggestions, news, cartoons, and reviews. I write this portion of my blog because I am a big believer in the motivational speaker Charlie Jones' quote which says, "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.” I try to meet as many new people as possible and to read everything I can. This is my way of sharing that information with you. You can see a visual summary of the books I have reviewed for both adults and children over on my Facebook page. If you are interested in understanding my rating system for books you can read my Book Review Explanation here and What I Believe here. If you want to check out what I am currently reading or what I want to read next, friend me on Goodreads!

Today I am sharing my thoughts on Becoming Gertrude by Janice Peterson. Let me start by saying that I wanted to like this book from the beginning. It is from NavPress and that automatically makes it interesting to me.

There were a lot of things in this book that I really liked. My absolute favorite thing was her mentioning of the fact that "spiritual mentor-ship" gives the impression that there is some kind of hierarchy in the Christian faith when in fact we are all equal at the foot of the cross. She recommends instead "spiritual friendships" where you share one another's burdens and joys in Christ. That is awesome and I have never seen that in a Christian book before!

However...

As the author tells several stories about her interactions with various friends I came to realize that she has absolutely no problem with women being friends with men that are not their husbands. These are not casual friendships either. These are the kind with inside jokes and meeting together for extended periods of time, confiding and sharing intimate life details. While this author may have had the maturity to keep her heart in check I am willing to bet 75% of her target audience won't have the same discipline. Due to that fact alone, I cannot in good conscience give this book anything higher than a C- and I cannot recommend it to fellow believers.