Marian Beaman’s A+ Review

An English and creative writing professor at Hope College, Janzen takes her readers on a romp into new territory. With chapter headings like Lady Problems, The Ghost in the Tub, and Whippersnapper, the author reveals a serious health diagnosis, a haunted bathroom, and revelations from stepson Leroy.

If Janzen’s storytelling rivals that of Nora Ephron, her take on faith recalls Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. In the most unlikely congregation with “hand-clappin ’hallelujahs,” readers observe her spiritual transformation from skeptic to faith-filled: “But I had left Texas. I was in a different state now, a weird one, where I’d actually rather have cancer than a grudge.” About suffering, she poses the question, “ . . . if we didn’t suffer, would we still be human?” In so doing, she invites readers to examine their own beliefs.

A New York Times best-selling memoirist, Janzen has also published a collection of poetry, Babel’s Stair. I found the cadence of her lines often magnetizing like her use of metaphor, “Some sisters only pretend to like each other. When they speak of each other, their lips thin like pressed leaves and their tone takes on a crunchy sugar coating. ‘My sister? Well, her choices aren’t my choices, but she’s still my sister, Of course, I love her.’”

Once Janzen seemed to go off on a tangent when she discussed the GiftQuest report at her church and I lost interest. But soon she looped around to stories of weddings and marriage in her family and I was again hooked.

If you fancy an author who can use the words anagnoritic, jejune, and salvific adroitly in her text and then go spinning off a tale about silicone panty packs, Rhoda Janzen is the author for you.

Read the original post here. Thank you so much for letting me share this post on Always Write, Marian.

Author’s Biography on Amazon

Rhoda Janzen holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was the University of California Poet Laureate in 1994 and 1997. She is the author of Babel’s Stair, a collection of poems, and her poems have also appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Southern Review. She teaches English and creative writing at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

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