Guest Post (and a Giveaway!): Cynthia Ruchti & Facing the Dawn

When I am looking for a book that will entertain & encourage me, uplift me & challenge me, make me laugh & make me cry (sometimes all of these at the same time), the very first author to come to mind is Cynthia Ruchti. She is one of my fave authors & fave people, and I’m delighted to host her today to celebrate today’s release of her new book, Facing the Dawn!

FACING THE DAWN
GENRE: Inspirational Contemporay Fiction
PUBLISHER: Revell
RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2021
PAGES: 318

“An emotional roller coaster of loss, faith, hope, and redemption. I couldn’t stop reading.”—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author

While her humanitarian husband Liam has been digging wells in Africa, Mara Jacobs has been struggling. She knows she’s supposed to feel a warm glow that her husband is eight time zones away, caring for widows and orphans. But she is exhausted, working a demanding yet unrewarding job, trying to manage their three detention-prone and needy kids, failing at her to-repair list, and fading like a garment left too long in the sun.

Then Liam’s three-year absence turns into something more, changing everything and plunging her into a sunless grief. As Mara struggles to find her footing, she discovers that even when hope is tenuous, faith is fragile, and the future is unknown, we can be sure we are not forgotten . . . or unloved.

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Over My Shoulder

by Cynthia Ruchti, author of Facing the Dawn

“Are you done yet? Are you done yet? Are you done yet? Finish reading that book so we can talk about it!”

That’s how I always feel about a good book I’ve read. I can’t wait to discuss it, to delve deeper into character motivations and the why behind each scene, to talk about that moment when everything changed and the moment when it looked like hope was gone forever, to rehash how the book ended and where those characters might be now if they were flesh and blood.

I resist saying “if they were real,” because they are.

Urgency to discuss starts while I’m still writing a novel. It’s as if the person who will hold that story in her or his hands is reading over my shoulder as my fingers move on the keyboard.

Sometimes I glance up to catch their gaze, wondering how they’ll feel about the sentence I just wrote. Too snarky? Yeah, I thought so. Let me adjust it a little. Better? Thanks.

My heart tightens when the crushing moment shows up on the page. Oh, reader. Hang on. This will be rough. But hope is around the corner. Well, maybe two or three corners.

I’m always amazed that in the midst of misery, the human spirit can be caught unaware by a moment of humor that lets the reader catch her breath before diving back into the drama. So those rest stops pepper the pages even with tough topics on stage.

And when tears fall while I’m writing or editing, I reach for two tissues—one for me and one for my reader.

When writing Facing the Dawn, I knew it wouldn’t fit into the category of light reading–“I’ll just breeze through this during my lunch break.” I knew readers would recognize that certain scenes would require an emotional toll to keep walking the characters’ journeys. They cost me a heavy toll. The story is still being written on one of the reasons why.

But I kept pressing on. Why? For me and for readers like me who cling to the truth that since creation, there has never been a night that hasn’t been followed by a dawn. Facing that dawn—in a shattered relationship, a distanced friendship, a shredded mama-heart, a betrayal (real or imagined), loss and gain and deeper loss, recovery and discovery—is where our hope lies.

And isn’t that why we keep turning the pages? We’re looking for glimpses of hope’s dawning.

Readers, I can’t wait until you finish reading…so we can talk about it.

Cynthia Ruchti is the award-winning author of more than 30 books, including the novels Afraid of the Light, Miles from Where We Started, As Waters Gone By, Song of Silence, A Fragile Hope, and They Almost Always Come Home. Her books have been honored with more than 40 readers’, reviewers’, and retailers’ awards, including Romantic Times’s Inspirational Novel of the Year, four Selah Awards, and five Christian Retailing’s BEST Awards, a Carol Award, and two additional Carol and Christy finalist honors. Former president of and current professional relations liaison for American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW), Cynthia lives in Wisconsin and can be found online at www.cynthiaruchti.com. Her tagline is, “I can’t unravel. I’m hemmed in Hope.”

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Revell is offering a print copy of Facing the Dawn by Cynthia Ruchti to THREE of my readers! (US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.) This giveaway is subject to Reading Is My SuperPower’s giveaway policies which can be found here. Enter via the Rafflecopter form below.

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What about you? What makes you want to read Facing the Dawn by Cynthia Ruchti?