cover image Brokenness and Blessing: The Year I Got Everything I Wanted: A Spiritual Crisis

Brokenness and Blessing: The Year I Got Everything I Wanted: A Spiritual Crisis

Cameron Conant, . . NavPress, $12.99 (195pp) ISBN 978-1-60006-145-5

In this kiss-and-tell Gen-X memoir, Conant, a Christian publishing insider, chronicles his 28th year, in which he moved from Grand Rapids, Mich., to Nashville for a job and a girl. The job—marketing slick Bibles—turned out to be too corporate and the relationship too tempestuous, but Conant gradually returned to God via the nonjudgmental support he received in the Episcopal Church. Unfortunately, much of his too-little-processed recounting feels like it belongs on a blog rather than in a book. A recovering Baptist, Conant seems aware on some level that it’s a bit strange his religion doesn’t make more demands on his life. He comes across as simultaneously ashamed and proud of continued adolescent behavior like driving 100 miles per hour, tipping back too many beers, succumbing to Internet porn or overspending to impress. His writing lacks the maturity of Donald Miller’s or Lauren Winner’s in that it’s less about Conant finding God than it is about his increasingly desperate attempts to find himself. What saves the book from utter solipsism, apart from its raw and bracing candor, is Conant’s keen eye for detail and his wry take on the masks Christians wear. (Sept.)