Saving Justice by Susan CrawfordMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I had the pleasure of receiving an Advanced Read Copy (ARC) of Susan Crawford’s “Saving Justice” published through Redbud Press. Unfortunately, a death in the family means I’m late getting this review out but the book is still available in print and electronic format so it’s not too late to pick up your own copy, something I recommend you do if you are a fan of clean contemporary Christian romance with an underlying inner city theme.
The story revolves around elementary school teacher Kinley Reid who lost her brother to gang-related violence and now struggles to help her students who are at-risk for the same outcome. Self-made real estate entrepreneur Nash McGuire, however, wants nothing to do with the neighborhood or poverty he grew up in. Kinley and Nash meet when one of her students, fourth grader Justice, vandalizes his Nash’s expensive car. As a form of punishment to the child rather than jail time, Kinley gets Nash to agree to let Justice repay some of the costs for repairing his car by doing ‘community service’ at the house Nash is trying to renovate and sell.
Ms. Crawford did a superb job showing how one must often step outside of their comfort zone to truly meet the needs of God’s people. A true Jesus-follower cannot expect to always sit at home or within the four walls of their church building to share God’s message. Kinley exhibits this through her willingness to work in a rough area of Oklahoma City to provide quality education opportunities for the disadvantaged children in the area, but it doesn’t just stop there. She worries when one of her students fails to show up at school and goes to his house to ask about him, stepping in when he gets caught vandalizing a car and convincing the owner not to press charges. Instead, she persuades Nash to allow the juvenile delinquent to work off the cost of the damages by helping out at the house Nash is renovating in the neighborhood.
But not everything is wine and roses. Nash just wants to finish the renovations and get out of the neighborhood, which only brings up bad memories of his own troubled childhood but he can’t seem to say ‘No’ to the persistent teacher. Justice finds himself torn between family loyalty to help bring in much needed money despite the actual method being illegal or following his teacher’s guidance and getting an education so he can live a better life without having to sacrifice his morals. Brilliant writing details the struggle between doing what’s right and what’s comfortable while adding depth to the characters that make you feel like you’ve known them all your life or could be them rather just reading about them for a few hours.
A few small details prevent me from giving a perfect 5 stars for this book but it is close. At one point, Kinley and Nash follow Justice with one of his family members who is known to be a drug dealer and all around bad dude. Nash, quite logically, points out how dangerous following this guy might be and, even though I personally am a Jesus follower, the tirade Kinley goes into about how she had to do it and is basically obligated as a Christian to do so totally turned me off. I get we have to step out on faith and take risks at times but to put yourself into danger when you don’t have to can’t be what God wants. If I had been Nash at this point in the story, I would have told her to stop and let me out of the car, but it may just be a person thing for me. It just seemed very unlikely that someone who wasn’t a follower, like Nash, would have continued to help her when she seemed bent on putting herself into danger. For a new follower or someone just getting their feet wet in Christian fiction might feel alienated by this but fortunately the tirade is only a short portion of the one page, so it can be skipped.
The second thing that bothered me somewhat was how contrived some of the situations putting Nash and Kinley together seemed. First, he’s a successful real estate professional. I’m sure he has contractors that help him with his other properties so it didn’t make sense to me that he would work on this one by himself, especially since it caused so much emotional turmoil. Also, it didn’t so much bother me that he parked his fancy car in front of the house while he worked in this bad neighborhood because I’ve seen it with some of the house flipping shows on TV. However, this nice fancy car caused a problem when you think about the tools he needed to carry for the work on the house. He could have had the material delivered but leaving tools inside this house that didn’t have any security seemed very foolish. In addition, after working all day with drywall, wood dust, etc., he just gets into the plush car and drives home? I think it would have made more sense if he had just stopped by the job site in this car when it was vandalized instead of actually working on the house. Then he could have brought a work truck back to work, which would have stood out less in the neighborhood as well.
Overall, Ms. Crawford weaves a very entertaining romance that presents a strong inner city theme. With just a few tweaks, it would have been a 5 star book for me.
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