A solitary artisan. A legacy of bread-baking. And one secret that could collapse her entire identity.

Stones for Bread by Christa Parrish

About the author: Christa Parrish is the award-winning author of three novels. When she’s not writing, she’s homeschooling her three children. Married to author and pastor Chris Coppernoll, Christa serves with him as co-leader of their church’s youth ministry as well as serving as a facilitator for a divorce recovery ministry. By her own confession, she is now also slightly obsessed with the art of baking bread. 🙂

About this book: Liesl McNamara’s life can be described in one word: bread.  From her earliest memory, her mother and grandmother passed down the mystery of baking and the importance of this deceptively simple food. And now, as the owner of Wild Rise bake house, Liesl spends every day up to her elbows in dough, nourishing and perfecting her craft.

But the simple life she has cultivated is becoming quite complicated. Her head baker brings his troubled grandson into the bakeshop as an apprentice. Her waitress submits her recipes to a popular cable cooking show. And the man who delivers her flour – a single father with strange culinary habits – seems determined to win Liesl’s affection.

When Wild Rise is featured on television, her quiet existence appears a thing of the past. And then a phone call from a woman claiming to be her half-sister forces Liesl to confront long-hidden secrets in her family’s past. With her precious heritage crumbling around her, the baker must make a choice: allow herself to be buried in detachment and remorse, or take a leap of faith into a new life.

Genre: Fiction/Christian/General

Judge this book by its cover? It’s perfect. Hats off to Thomas Nelson–again.

If this book were a movie, I would rate it: PG. Clean yet gently edgy.

Reminds me of… Bread Alone by Judith R. Hendricks.

Buy it if…  You love the novels of Christa Parrish (and once you’ve read one, how can you not?), the art of baking bread, or inspirational fiction threaded thickly with both realism and romance.

Why did I read this book? For Litfuse Publicity and Thomas Nelson for review.

Would I read another by this author? I ordered two more of hers before I was even halfway done with the first.

My take: In an interview for Litfuse Publicity, Christa Parrish said: “Stones for Bread is part protagonist memoir, part history lesson, part cookbook, and part contemporary journey from isolation to healing from the past. My agent, Bill Jensen, had started baking bread and mentioned how interesting it would be to write a book about an artisan baker who enters her bread into a contest and her changing world when she wins. I combined that idea with my own idea of writing something that included multiple ‘formats.'”

Parrish’s multiple formats provide a narrative rhythm to her story that is as soothing as the act of kneading dough. The exclusively first-person perspective unfolds in exquisite prose, which manages to be both literary and literate. Stones for Bread is a compelling story with themes of mental illness and adoption, as well as an education on the making and baking of bread. It certainly exposed for me a beauty in bread I never before fully appreciated. Indeed, there is one line toward the end about the transcendent meaning of bread that literally paused my breath.

At times raw, always revealing, Parrish’s characters are earthy and occasionally painfully human; deeply original yet universally relate-able. All told, I savored every page of this rich and beautifully layered novel about what it means to love and be loved.

Thanks to Thomas Nelson for providing me a free copy to review. All opinions are mine.

See what other reviewers are saying here. And…Christa Parrish is celebrating her fourth novel, Stones for Bread, with a KitchenAid Mixer giveaway.

Easy steps to enter:

1. Follow Christa Parrish and TNZ Fiction on Pinterest.

2. Then Pin the Stones for Bread book cover (below), the contest graphic (above), or both, and link to this post (using this URL: #StonesforBread KitchenAid Mixer Contest #ChristaParrish http://litfusegroup.com/campaigns/stones-for-bread-by-christa-parrish).

3. Then fill out THIS SHORT FORM to let us know. (There are also some additional ways to earn extra entries, as well as an option for non-Pinterest users. It’s true—people like that do exist!)

Questions? Email info @ litfusegroup dot com.

Winner will be announced on 12/9 on Christa’s Facebook Page.