A Writer's Review of Lynn Austin's 'Wonderland Creek' ~~ by member blogger Dawn Crandall

I checked Wonderland Creek out through my local library last week--onto my kindle. I’ve read one other book by Lynn Austin—the only other one I knew to be written in first person point of view, A Proper Pursuit. And perhaps over the years I started to wonder if she’d only written that one book in first person just to see if she could do it well (which she did—an amazing job, in fact!), and stopped looking after so long. 

Well, somehow in the last month or so I found out about her book Wonderland Creek, which came out last year. It wasn’t one I needed to read to review on A Passion For Pages... but one of those books that I just simply wanted to make time for. And I am so glad I did!

Alice Ripley is an adorable protagonist who has everything she ever wanted within hand’s reach... a steady, safe boyfriend, a job at the local library... and all the books in the world to read... and the time to read them. Only she loses her boyfriend and her job in the same day, and suddenly realizes that without them her “real” life had become rather boring...  and that she’d been doing most of her living through the pages of her favorite books.

Alice finds herself deserted in Acorn, KY—dropped off by her eccentric aunt and uncle—to deliver the boxes of books she’d been collecting for the start-up library ran by Miss Leslie McDougal. Only Leslie McDougal isn’t a miss, but a very scruffy young man who (of course) goes by the name Mack... and who is much more than he first seems.

I really liked the whole aspect of Alice being lost in Wonderland—only to find that she wasn’t really lost at all, but constantly finding herself and a real living faith in God past the Sunday School verses she’d had memorized. There was also a very sweet romance involved in the book—however the main story was about Alice learning that life wasn’t all about her and her books.

I give Lynn Austin's Wonderland Creek 5 Stars.

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Dawn Crandall writes long inspirational historical romantic suspense from first person point of view and is represented by Joyce Hart of Hartline Literary Agency. She has written two books which are on submission as part of a series, and is working on the third. Soon after finishing her first book and becoming a member of American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW) in July 2011 she attended the ACFW national conference where she gained literary representation and soon-after became a 2012 ACFW Genesis Contest Semi-Finalist. She has a BA in Christian Education from Taylor University, writes full-time and lives in northeast Indiana with her ever-supportive engineer husband, Jonathan, and their two cats, Lilly and Pumpkin. Dawn co-hosts a book review blog called A Passion for Pages at apassionforpages.blogspot.com and tweets those reviews at @dawnwritesfirst. To find out more about her, visit her author webpage at dawncrandall.blogspot.com or her Facebook author page: facebook.com/DawnCrandallWritesFirst.