I am a Christian.

As such, the goal of every book that I write is to glorify God, and to encourage the reader to think of Him, by reflecting the world that He has made. Many non-Christians have read and enjoyed the stories, there are rarely any overtly Christian things in it, but there are heavy elements of it, and an underlying focus on what is good and right and true. Through the dark, there will always be light, and good will always win.

There are boundaries that I will not cross as an author, and this is a promise that I make to all of my readers, as they pick up these stories:

1: I will not include sexual content on page, ever. There will be no lusting of main characters after each other and passing it off as attraction. To the extent that there is romance, it will be handled in a way that is wholesome, pointing back to the goodness of God’s design for marriage between 1 man and 1 woman, and sex for the privacy of the marriage bed. Sex is a very good thing that is distorted when placed on the pages of a novel, or the screen of a TV.

2: No glorified of gratitudinous gore. We are not called to meditate on what is horrible and awful and terrible, but what is good and right and true and lovely and of good report. There will be hard things in books: death, life, falling kingdoms, broken homes, wars, abandonment, etc, but the point will not be to dwell on those things, but to have them acknowledge what is hard, and point us back to what we should be thinking about in hard times to help us walk through them. Violence will be kept to PG-13 or below.

3: No witchcraft: unless it is portrayed as something horrible, awful and against the realm on the natural order, pointing back to the fact that the Lord says it is an abomination.

4: No LGBTQ movement. I believe that the Lord made marriage to be between 1 man and 1 woman. The end. If you want books with that kind of content or representation, you will not find them coming from me.

5: No militant Feminism: Why do I mention this? Because I believe that there are far too many stories full of activism these days, with ideals and beliefs being pushed that are contrary to the Word of God. The Lord made man and women equal before Him, with a created order, as Christ and the Church have an order. I will not be contributing to the mindset that women are better than men, or that you need to be ruling armies as a woman in order to be faithful to your calling.

Have people from the those ideals read your stories?
Yes! They have and enjoyed them. I just will not be representing those things within my books. So if you do not enjoy books without those worldviews, then these will not be the books for you.

Home, family and the Lord will be valued.

Frost Light is YA, and the mildest fantasy you will probably ever read. It feels more like historical fiction, so content wise on the fantasy side, there is pretty much nothing.

Themes:

Frost deals with abandonment of both parents, prejudice against families, and there is a man in it who was verbally hounded by his father for things outside his control (his size.) They are all in past tense, as they characters walk through their pasts and work to reconcile them, but the themes are present.

It also deals with themes of a father who had a gambling problem, and recrued debts all around his village. It is never directly said, but is understood, and the main character and her family are living in exile to pay for those debts, and wrestling with whether or not those debts should ever have been theirs.

It is inferred that the son had a rough past as well, though it is never stated what that past was. They say that he spent a lot of time with rougher men around the docks, and pubs are mentioned once or twice, but it is never stated what actually happened. There was no reason to harp on things that could be understood by those that needed to, and safely passed over by younger readers this way.

There are multiple snow storms, with uncertainty of whether or not loved ones are safe surrounding them. If your child can handle The Long Winter or Little Women (both parts), they should be alright with this book.

Scenes to be aware of:

19, Ice Shards: The Main character’s sister falls through the ice, and is taken up unconscious. The scene is more intense than any other scene in the book, aside from the ones following with the siblings watching beside her bed, to see if she will live.

Violence rating: G. This is milder than the Little House show, especially than the later seasons.

Sexual content: None.

Cursing: None, but a few made up swears.

Sparrow in the Sun is adult fantasy, meaning that it was written to target adult readers. With that in mind, there are some heavier, darker themes to the story and series:

Themes:

There has been a price on the head of the main character’s race for the past nearly 15 years, when the story begins. All of them who are caught, it is understood, will not be treated with human rights. Nothing of this kind ever happens on page, but it is referred to.

In addition, the Queen has been ordering villages burned, and whole towns wiped out for insurrection. The theme of living in a country under the threat of civil war, political and religious upheaval and a time of the suppression of freedom of speech is a big theme.

Scenes to be aware of:

Chapter 34, Claw: This scene deals with an attack by a large bear-like creature. It is not graphic, but it is intense, and the heroine nearly dies, and suffers from the effects of nearly drowning afterward.

Chapter 43, Dark Hall: A man is found bleeding out in the hallway, and all signs point toward it being done intentionally to root out secrets by emmesaries with ill intentions.

Chapter 53, The Sword Tree: This scene is by far the darkest in the whole book, but is expanding to show the effect of the tyranny of the Queen on the country in first person. The main character is with a party of people who stumble upon a recent mass grave. It is as non-graphic as possible, but the scene is dark. I encourage parents to read this scene before letting their children read it. Children who are able to handle LOTR should be alright with this story, but again, parental discretion is encouraged and advised, as this book was not written for children, but adults.

Violence rating:PG-13. Children who can handle LOTR and Lawhead should be alright.

Sexual content: None.

Cursing: Two instances of the word ‘damn’ used by a woman who is not to be emulated in chapter 44, Gulliame. There are some other made up swear phrases.