This summer I’ve had the opportunity to read a lot of books. Some were captivating, others were just OK. One or two left me longing to recapture the time I wasted reading them. Two were intense page turners I couldn’t wait to dive into every night. Today and Wednesday I’m going to review those two books for you, and on Friday I will have this month’s Fan Mail Friday vlog.

If you have a question you would like me to answer, send it to me at fanmailfriday AT beingagirlbooks.com (replace AT with @, this is just my humble attempt to keep the spammers away). I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

One of my favorite reads this summer was My Hands Came Away Red by Lisa McKay. This book follows an adventurous teenage girl named Cori as she spends her summer training in mission trip boot camp and building a church in the outermost parts of Indonesia.

The first few pages give an honest impression of Cori as your typical teen who is heading on this trip to clear her mind and work through how she really feels about her non-Christian boyfriend Scott. At missions boot camp she meets Kyle, a rugged new Christian with an in-your-face attitude and handsome good looks. Immediately she becomes conflicted over her feelings for the two.

Cori instantly bonds with Elissa and Drew, the two girls she shares a tent with, and off the team of six teens goes to the jungle. Although the manual labor required for the trip seems like more than she can bear, Cori truly begins to enjoy her work and the relationships she’s building.

With only hours left in their trip, things go terribly awry and a religious war breaks out between Muslims and Christians, the church Cori and her friends built is burned to the ground and the pastor and his wife are murdered right before their eyes.

Without their team leader, Cori and her five new friends are forced into the jungles of Indonesia to hide in order to survive. The bulk of the book follows the group through the long and dangerous weeks on their own as they battle wild boars, Muslim militants, the effects of malaria and the doubts threatening to rob them of their faith.

The thing that really struck me about this book was the authenticity of its characters. I’ve been involved with teen missions for years, and I love that Lisa McKay accurately captured the different motives these characters had in choosing to go to Indonesia and the inner war many of them had with their faith as they fought their way through an unfamiliar and deadly jungle. Is God still good when you have an innocent pastor’s blood staining your t-shirt?

This is not a novel exclusively for teens. Instead it’s a book for all Christians who sometimes don’t have the ideal motives for doing ministry, have questions that challenge their faith when life doesn’t go as planned and who have seen how quickly a shared experience can create a lifelong bond between a group of believers. Whether you’ve ever ventured to the mission field, or you are just considering doing it one day, My Hands Came Away Red is a must read.

I give this book 5 stars. You can buy it here.