Star for Jesus (and Other Jobs I Quit): Rediscovering the Grace That Sets Us Free

Readers should accept God’s unconditional grace and eschew performative faith, according to this warts-and-all outing from novelist Stuart (Heart Land). A lifelong striver, Stuart recalls the “shocking number of years” she spent trying to be a gold-star Christian—“reading the Bible at a certain time of day, for a certain amount of time... working and working and pausing only to check the boxes”—before realizing that God “just wanted me,” flaws and all. In chatty prose, Stuart details how God’s grace inspired her to begin accepting her body after years of nitpicking, and endure through a harrowing miscarriage. The resulting insights about how grace and pain coexist are moving (grace “most certainly does not ask us to hurry up our broken hearts,” she writes), though the book’s structure can become repetitive: chapters generally feature a personal anecdote followed by energetic meditations on God’s grace that rehash the same general points in often overzealous figurative language (“There is room in the lifeboat because he IS the lifeboat. You don’t have to keep swimming alongside, letting Him know that you’re great!”). Still, believers will appreciate Stuart’s enthusiastic efforts to frame grace as more than “just a word at church.” Agent: Andrea Heinecke, Bindery Agency. (Apr.)