Top Book: Garden of Madness (Hanging Gardens of Babylon)
Garden of Madness
Things I loved:
The character of the hero. He was a friend of Daniel. But he was also a man desiring above all else to be faithful to the LORD. At the same time, he struggled with how certain challenges in his life seemed to reflect that he was not as faithful as he thought.
His prayers. I have never in my life read a book AGAIN IMMEDIATELY. But I did with Garden of Madness. I hadn’t bookmarked his prayers and wanted to experience that again. It sent me to the Scriptures to memorize (of others, Psalm 91). How this psalm plays itself out in the book is THRILLING!
The heroine. Spunky and full of life, you’ve certainly known young women like Tia before, and you can see how hard life is for her given her background. Her hobbies are boggling–but seem to be historically possible, which is fun to consider.
The history: When I got to the name Zerubbabel, I looked up his history and was FLOORED by what I discovered online. It made me love the book even more!
Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar. Since my childhood, these two have my absolute favorite characters in the Old Testament. And to see them in this story was like seeing someone from my family show up in a book I was reading. The author’s license in how she expanded on this season of Nebuchadnezzar’s life was true to Scripture, I think honoring to God, and shows in a delightful story what passes as a paragraph in the Book of Daniel.
The way the enemies to lovers worked itself out was phenomenal. As the cherry on the top of this series about darkness and light in the ancient world, the prayers of the Jewish man show the amazing GRACE and KINDNESS of God, even during the Babylonian Captivity.
