Home By Another Way

“What I don’t get is how you can be so into Christ when it comes to your own life and then totally forget about Him when it comes to everybody else.” She was by now inches from my nose. “How can you be such a good Christian about diving for Pete’s sake and then be such a jerk about people?”

Book: Home by Another Way by Nancy Rue, Crossway Books, 1991

Genre: Realistic Fiction/Sports Fiction

Target Audience: Boys 13+

Subjects: Friendship, Family Relationships, Divorce, Prejudice, Love For Others

Summary: Diving is much more than a sport for Josh. It’s the last hope he has of earning his father’s love. Since his parents divorced Josh has been working on finding some way to gain the attention of his father. Diving seems to have done it – his father is at least forking over all the cash to get private lessons from a professional. But he’s still absent, only his money is making an appearance. If Josh gets far enough though, that is sure to change. So while the other boys his age chase after girls or fancy cars to parties, Josh pursues diving. He never imagined anything could change let, especially not a young boy looking up to him. Yet when Phong enters his life, rather, forces himself into Josh’s life, things begin to change. An emergency right before the most crucial moment of his career could change his entire world.

Notes: The author famous for her stories for teen girls has written a beautiful story for boys. Like all her other books, the spiritual elements run deep in this story. Josh finds his very identity in diving. He sees it as what God wants him to do. Then when God starts bringing people into his life that force Josh to love them more than his sport, he gains a much greater understanding of God and what He wants of Josh. This book deals a lot with identity and how to find an identity solely in Christ rather than what a broken family has shaped. Both Josh and his sister struggle with relationships due to the example set by their dad. It also gets a little bit into prejudice as the little boy Josh befriends is a poor boy from another culture and Josh realizes he has a lot of misconceptions about the culture and the people from it.

I highly recommend this book to all young boys!

Spiritual Content Recommendation Scale: 5/5

Reviewer: J:-)mi

1 Corinthians 1:27-30 – But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God--that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.