Truefaced (by Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol and John Lynch)

(Amazon UK link)

It’s more than fifteen years since I read ‘Truefaced’ by Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol and John Lynch. I vaguely recalled that it was an encouraging book about authenticity, but nothing more. It was definitely time for a reread.

It’s not a long book - just 155 pages in my paperback - with seven chapters. I read one at a time - sometimes just half a chapter - over ten days or so. I don’t think I found anything new in it, but I thought it well-written, the three authors blending their styles seamlessly. And it contains plenty to think about.  The subtitle is, 'Trust God and others with who you really are', and that's what the book is basically about. 

The first premise made is that most of us put on ‘masks’ when we’re with other people. Some more than others, of course. But it’s a rare person who is totally honest about who they are, all the time, and who doesn’t change their behaviour depending on who they are with. 

It’s an overtly Christian book, not one intended for secular psychologists or people without faith. I expect anyone could benefit from reading it, but without a Christian perspective a reader would have to skip quite a lot. The point made in the first chapter is that God made us exactly who we are, and that he has dreams and plans for each of us. But the most important thing is to become our authentic selves, before God and before everyone else. Growing closer to God and more open is more important than any amount of success in careers or any other field. 

There’s a lot about sinning, too: about sins we commit, and those committed against us. They don’t specify exactly what they mean by this, although there are some useful anecdotes, some of them quite eye-opening. Repenting means truly acknowledging that we have done wrong, and taking whatever steps are needed to put it right, if possible, and avoiding the same sin in future. But, as they explain, we can’t do this in our own strength. We need the grace of God, who loves us no matter what. 

When sins are committed against us, including terrible childhood abuse for some, they encourage turning to God and telling him what happened, in direct language, acknowledging the pain, resentment, anger and everything else that resulted. They don’t suggest ever trusting someone again if they have hurt us deeply, but point out that the long-term emotional effects of something negative can even outweigh the initial crime. And only by forgiveness, with God’s grace, can we start to move forward.

There’s a lot more in this vein. I couldn’t relate to all of it - I was fortunate to have a mostly comfortable childhood, free of any kind of abuse. So it’s usually easy for me to forgive and move on from minor hurts or slights. I suspect some who have suffered a lot might find the advice difficult to take, even trite; the examples given of specific people tend to make it all sound rather too easy. 

Quite a bit of the book is taken up with images of two rooms - one where the aim is to please God, and one where the aim is to trust God. The authors explain that many well-meaning, devout Christians do all they can to try and please God, and in doing so miss the point that God wants us to trust him. Only that way can we be free to be the people he made us.

I thought this image was a useful one at first, but it was taken rather to extremes in a way that can happen with metaphors. The implication was that we’re all actually in one or other of these rooms, relating (or not relating) to others there with us. There’s certainly some truth in the pictures, but there were rather too many literal-sounding details for my tastes; it started to feel rather forced.

Still, I found the book very readable, and thought about it sometimes during the day. I think it could be very useful for people caught up in trying to please God - and, very often, trying to please other people - as a starting point in becoming more authentic. 

Review copyright 2025 Sue's Book Reviews

I've got your number (by Sophie Kinsella)

(Amazon UK link)

Our local reading group wanted something light for the post-Christmas/New Year period, and opted for ‘I’ve got your number’ by Sophie Kinsella. Sadly, the author died at just 55 towards the end of last year. I had previously read this book, in April 2015; after nearly eleven years, I had forgotten everything about it, other than that (as hinted by the title) there was a misplaced mobile phone.

Poppy is the main character in this novel. She’s a typical Kinsella heroine: feisty, generous, kind.. and somewhat impetuous. I couldn’t help liking her. We meet her when she’s panicking about having lost her engagement ring. She has been at a gathering of her closest friends, prior to her wedding, in a hotel. One of them badgered her to borrow the ring to try it on, and Poppy was too generous to refuse. Then it got passed around, and she kept her eye on it, but events overtook them… and the ring vanished.

Emily of New Moon (by Lucy Maud Montgomery)

(Amazon UK link)

It’s more than twenty years since I read ‘Emily of New Moon’ by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I had vaguely remembered the storyline, and that I had liked it, but also that I had been a bit irritated by spelling errors in some of Emily’s writing. I was quite keen to read it again. The book was first published in 1923, as contemporary fiction, and set in Canada. 

Emily is eleven at the start of the book. She’s a dreamy, poetical child - far more so than ‘Anne of Green Gables’, the author’s better-known heroine. And Emily has spent the first ten years of her life living contentedly with her beloved father. Her mother died when she was very young, but her father understands her well. He encourages her to read widely, and to write, and they’re looked after by their housekeeper Ellen. 

But Emily’s father is not well - we learn, later, that he’s dying of TB (or ‘consumption’ as it was known). Emily is devastated; her world is breaking apart. And when he dies, her mother’s relatives gather. Her mother had been somewhat cast out of the family when she ran away to marry Emily’s father, but they all know their duty. And that must be to keep Emily out of an orphanage.

How to live the Christian life (by Selwyn Hughes)

(Amazon UK link)

In the past 45 years or so, we have acquired quite a selection of Christian non-fiction, by a wide variety of authors. There are some whose works I reread fairly regularly. But there are other books which, as far as I can tell, I have not read for over twenty-five years. 

Back in the 1980s and 1990s it was easy and inexpensive to buy paperback books at church sales or Christian bookshops, and I suspect that ‘How to live the Christian life’ by the Welsh writer Selwyn Hughes was one of them. We used to use his Bible-reading notes until about twenty years ago; so it’s not surprising that we collected two or three of his books. This book was originally published in 1974, but revised and reprinted in this edition in 1981. 

It’s not a long book, and it seems to have some useful teaching in it for someone who is new to the Christian life. Inevitably it’s very dated; back in the 1980s, there weren’t nearly so many useful resources as there are now, and - of course - no Internet. So books of this kind would probably have been welcomed by people who came to faith in their teenage or student years, at one of the many missions or rallies that were so popular at the time.

Marshmallows for breakfast (by Dorothy Koomson)

(Amazon UK link)

I first read Dorothy Koomson’s novel ‘Marshmallows for breakfast’ in 2009. It was my introduction to the author, and I liked it so much that - over the next few years - I put several of her books on my wishlist. More recently she has written psychological thrillers which appeal to me less than her earlier character-based novels, although they have plenty of tension, and are rather harder-hitting than most women’s fiction.

In the past decade and a half, I had inevitably forgotten everything about this book, including the characters.  The narrator is Kendra, a young British woman who has just returned from Australia. She’s been living and working there for a couple of years, and has left due to a crisis in her love life. We gradually learn more about the man concerned in the course of the book, and their story. He appears to have been the love of her life… and she has a letter from him which she has not yet opened. 

Kendra is moving into a studio apartment and hopes to be left alone, socially. She has a job lined up at the agency where she’s been working abroad; her boss, Gabrielle, is also a good friend. It’s clear early in the book that something terrible happened, some years earlier, which make Kendra quite jumpy, and unwilling to trust people.