At Every Turn Review

This time, I’m going to review At Every Turn by: Anne Mateer.

It’s 1916 and missionaries serving in Africa come to Ally’s church. She’s struck by the little faces presented in pictures. She wants to help and ambitiously pledges three thousand dollars. However, getting the money isn’t as easy as she expected, so she hatches a plan and secretly competes in her dad’s racecar. No one can find out she is actually a girl and keeping the secret becomes increasingly difficult. To top it off, she’s doesn’t know if she’d lost sight of God’s will in her excitement for the races.

This book was a really refreshing read for me. Originally, I picked it up in a time that I wasn’t really in the mood for Christian Fiction. (As you can see by my many other reviews prior to this one, I have been going through a bit of a YA faze.) This book was left stranded on my ‘currently reading’ list for weeks and I was stuck in the first few chapters. This is not at all a reflection on the book because once I picked it up again, I was really pleasantly surprised by it.

The characters in this book really felt like real people that were struggling through their real problems. The main character, Ally, struggled through indecision and trying to follow God’s plan. Like so many of us, she didn’t take the time to really wait on God, but forged ahead. Her journey felt so real to me.

I really enjoyed that Ally was a Christian from the beginning. Many of the Christian Fiction books I read deal with people finding God throughout the book, but it’s nice that she struggled through many of the things I struggle though. It’s really refreshing to find a book that really showed a girl with her heart in the right place still making the mistakes that we as Christians can often make.

The romance in this book was really sweet, but not overdone. It really was in the background and the book dealt more with Ally’s growth. Ally really felt like a real person through the relationships she had. She was just oblivious enough that I could identify with her innocence, but she wasn’t so ignorant that I got annoyed. Anne Mateer did an amazing job writing characters that really came off the page and felt like they could be people I would meet in life.

This book also had some moments that really resonated with me. There was a lot of good Godly wisdom in this book. Here are some of the lines I couldn’t help but read a few times over.

“Do you think the Lord takes note of us only after we turn to Him? No, He woos us through our whole lives.”

“But even when we love the Lord we won’t live a sinless life, though we try. The key is recognizing our wrong. Repenting, as you have done. Then moving forward with a lesson learned.”

“We all have a call from God. And it will always seem a strange call to some. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t our purpose and calling. And it doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid occupation.”

“But be very sure that is the Lord’s direction and not your own desire, Alyce. Sometimes our motives get so tangled up it’s hard to discern the difference.”