A Voice in the Wind

My favorite book now is hard for me to pick.  I love so many.  I like to keep track of the books I’ve read and according to goodreads I’ve read 269 books and I’m sure I’ve forgotten to add more.  But for the sake of this assignment I will pick one that is a top favorite.  It’s call A Voice in the Wind by Francine Rivers.  Rivers is mainly a romance author, and there is a hint of that in her books, but A Voice in the Wind is a historical fiction.  After the destruction of Jerusalem, Hadassah, a Christian girl, is taken as a slave for a Roman aristocrat family under the pretense that she is a Jew.  If anyone found out she was a Christian, she would be sent to the arena to be brutally killed.  This book is about her, her faith, and the Roman family she serves and grows to love.  To make things more difficult she falls in love with the handsome epicurean in the family, who surprisingly falls in love with her.  But because he does not believe in God, she cannot love him as he would like.

I loved this book because it delved into the struggles of a girl around my age who lived my standards but in a wholly different time. Hadassah was so much like me in many ways and her personality and her actions in the book inspired me to be a better person.  She followed her faith no matter the consequences.  Her strength and courage in the book gave me a model to go by.  I loved the historical detail and I thought the author did a marvelous job portraying the beliefs, actions, and environments of the Roman people. The book also gave me much to think about concerning the beliefs of the Romans and the reason for their fall.  It taught me history and gave me an image in my mind of what life must have been like.  After reading this book, I went on to read other historical fiction books to learned and, in a way, experienced history more than I ever could in a classroom.