Guest Post (and a Giveaway!): Amanda Cox & The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery

I am delighted to have Amanda Cox back on the blog today to talk about one of her favorite quotes from The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery

THE SECRET KEEPERS OF OLD DEPOT GROCERY
GENRE: Inspirational Dual Timeline Fiction
PUBLISHER: Revell
RELEASE DATE: September 7, 2021
PAGES: 352

Present Day. After tragedy plunges her into grief and unresolved anger, Sarah Ashby returns to her childhood home determined to finally follow her long-denied dream of running Old Depot Grocery alongside her mother and grandmother. But when she arrives, her mother, Rosemary, announces to her that the store is closing. Sarah and her grandmother, Glory Ann, make a pact to save the store, but Rosemary has worked her entire life to make sure her daughter never follows in her footsteps. She has her reasons–but she’ll certainly never reveal the real one.

1965. Glory Ann confesses to her family that she’s pregnant with her deceased fiancé’s baby. Pressured into a marriage of convenience with a shopkeeper to preserve the family reputation, Glory Ann vows never to love again. But some promises are not as easily kept as she imagined.

This dual-timeline story from Amanda Cox deftly explores the complexity of a mother-daughter dynamic, the way the secrets we keep shape our lives and the lives of others, and the healing power of telling the truth.

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by Amanda Cox, author of The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery

Carrie,

Thank you for the opportunity to be a guest on Reading is My SuperPower! It’s such an honor, and I am so excited to chat a little bit about one of my favorite quotes from The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery.

I love what these words reveal about the heart of Clarence Clearwater, one of the secondary characters who has a monumental impact on the main characters’ lives. Not only that, but his words have been very real in my own life.

“Tell me what troubles you. It’s the things we don’t say that have the power to rule over our lives without our permission.” —Clarence Clearwater

People hold back the truth, keep secrets, for an endless variety of reasons. To avoid consequences. To protect another person from pain. To keep someone from forming a negative opinion. To cover mistakes. To construct the image of how they wish things were. But at the root of all those things is one factor, fear.

Whenever I’m pondering our human reactions to mistakes, my mind always goes back to the first thing Adam and Eve did after eating forbidden fruit. They hid.  And we’ve been repeating that reaction ever since. Even if we do tell the truth, deep down there lingers a little knee jerk instinct to pretend it never happened. To hide.

When we choose to hide the truth, we construct an illusion of safety. But as you’ll see in the lives of the characters of The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery, kept secrets start dictating lives and decisions. Those secrets become the things running the show. And it becomes even more life-altering when the characters become unaware of the subtle role their secrets are playing in the lives of others.

The only thing that can break the cycle created by unspoken words is the truth. Opening up the vulnerable places and look at them as they actually are instead of viewing them as we wish they were.

There have been times in my life in which I’ve had to face hard truths. Truths that hurt. Truths that made me angry. Truths that made my world feel a little shaky. There might have been pain found with encountering truth, but there was also healing. A chance to start again. Like my buddy Clarence says, it’s the things we don’t say that have unintended power in our lives. And that power is fueled by fear instead of love.

1 John 4:18 states it best. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.”

I don’t know about you, but my human nature has yet to be perfected in loving others and in allowing myself to be loved. But it is something that I will ever be growing toward, and this type of love will challenge each of the characters in The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery.

Amanda Cox is the author of The Edge of Belonging and The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery. A blogger and a curriculum developer for a national nonprofit youth leadership organization, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Bible and theology and a master’s degree in professional counseling, but her first love is communicating through story. Her studies and her interactions with hurting families over a decade have allowed her to create multidimensional characters that connect emotionally with readers. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her husband and their three children. Learn more at AmandaCoxWrites.com.

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Revell is offering a print copy of The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery by Amanda Cox 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 The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery by Amanda Cox?