Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan ~ Book Tour and Review

Publisher's Description:
In a most improbable friendship, she found love. In a world where women were silenced, she found her voice. From New York Times bestselling author Patti Callahan comes an exquisite novel of Joy Davidman, the woman C. S. Lewis called “my whole world.” When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis—known as Jack—she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, finding a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy. In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest love stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren’t meant to have a voice—and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn’t know they had. At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, Becoming Mrs. Lewis is above all a love story—a love of literature and ideas and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.

My Thoughts:  
I am having a difficult time reviewing this book.  I was excited and very interested in the story of Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis.  I had watched Shadowlands years and years ago and vaguely remembered some of it so thought this book might be a great way to learn about first their pen pal relationship, then friendship, then love.  Unfortunately, it was everything else surrounding their story that finally made me set aside this book at 3/4 of the way through.  I just didn't care enough to push through to the end.  The pace in the book was very slow and because I didn't really know their story, I found it mentally tiring trying to separate the fact from fiction or the fleshing out of the story.   I felt the author did a ton of research into the topic and that she really gave a voice to Davidman who was a gifted author herself, but because of the times and circumstances of her life found herself struggling to find her place.  Joy Davidman did not have an easy life.  I enjoyed reading excerpts of Lewis and Davidman's correspondence and quotes from Lewis.  And the description of how the idea of Narnia and it's characters and story was most interesting.  The descriptions of England and it's countryside and Oxford were lovely and made me really want to visit that country.  That being said the circumstances surrounding their story and the way it was written read very much like a worldly novel to me.   Don't get me wrong, I read all sorts of genres beyond Christian fiction, but when I pick up a Christian fiction book, I have certain expectations.  I think that had the book been a memoir or biography I would have approached it from a different mindset as an actual factual read and would have thought nothing of it.  But because it is labeled as fiction and from a Christian publishing company, I found myself mentally tiring  and bogging down trying to sort what might have been actual fact and what was the author fleshing out the story.  Even if it had been a mainstream novel from a mainstream publishing house I would have approached it differently.  I found way too much detail surrounding circumstances that I was not expecting in my choice of Christian fiction.  And the amount of alcohol and drinking portrayed in the story not only on the part of Davidman's alcoholic husband but also on the part of Davidman herself was too much for me in a "christian fiction" novel.  Hence, I feel that for me, the story would have been better served as a non-fiction biography.  I also found the pace very slow.  The reviews by others seem to be divided down the center and leave it as a book you either love or not with not many reviews in the middle, but for me, I'm sorry to say, it was not my cup of tea.  It's one of those books where one would have to read it themselves to make up their own minds about it.

Thanks to BookLook Bloggers for providing a copy free of charge for my honest review.  All thoughts and opinions are my own and I was not required to give a positive review.