Great Day Every Day: Navigating Life’s Challenges with Purpose and Promise

However privileged one’s life might be, it will also be filled with moments of frustration and aggravation, and Lucado attempts to provide a Christian blueprint for happily dealing with an anxious world filled with “War. A bombed base. Heart attacks. Car wrecks. Urban sprawl,” and an assorted array of diseases and worries. Narrator Wayne Shepherd reads with a calm, steady, and affectless voice that is far too staid for a tract meant to uplift and inspire optimism. Lucado often describes what he feels his readers shouldn’t do—e.g., resigning one’s life to constant anxiety because (he sarcastically writes) “Worry brings joy. Worry puts the blue in the sky.” But Shepherd reads these passages with the same calm monotony as passages that are meant to inspire. Consequently, listeners may find it difficult to determine, based on Shepherd’s tone, whether sentences like “Friday, calculate the number of ways to die on an airplane” are meant ironically or earnestly. It’s the former, for the record. A Thomas Nelson hardcover. (Jan.)