Review: The Waiting Place by Eileen Button

Title: The Waiting Place: Learning to Appreciate Life’s Little Delays
Author: Eileen Button
Released: June 7, 2011
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Pages/format: 240 (Trade Paperback)
Genre: Nonfiction, Christian Memoir
Source: Thomas Nelson Publicist

Quick Synopsis: In a series of short personal essays, Eileen Button examines the “in-between” places in life and calls readers to celebrate the tension between what we hope for tomorrow and what we live with today.

From the back cover:

We all spend precious time just waiting. We wait in traffic, grocery store lines, and carpool circles. We wait to grow up, for true love, and for out children to be born. We even wait to die. But while we work hard at this business of living, life can sometimes feel like one long, boring meeting. Even today, with instant-gratification at our techno-laced fingertips, we can’t escape the waiting place. Somehow, in between our texting and tweeting and living and dying, we end up there again and again.

In The Waiting Place, Eileen Button takes us back to the days of curling irons an camping trips, first loves and final goodbyes, big dreams and bigger reality checks. She calls us to celebrate the tension between what we hope for tomorrow and what we live with today.

Quick Review: The Waiting Place is a beautifully written collection of personal essays, but I was a little disappointed that there was not more focus on God in the narrative.

In-Depth Review:

The Waiting Place begins with Eileen Button sitting on her couch, weary and uninspired, waiting for an idea for her weekly column to jump out at her from the pages of Newsweek. Button may not have hit upon the inspiration she needed for her column, but she was struck with the idea of this book. What follows are twenty-one personal vignettes which delve into the joys and frustrations, times of confusion and moments of clarity, that we all encounter in the waiting place.

The Waiting Place‘s greatest strength is the writing itself. Button has clearly honed her voice with practice and time, probably during her 2½+ years of writing for the Flint Journal. She never rambles, a fault all too common in memoirs, and seems to effortlessly strike the perfect balance between dry humor and thoughtful introspection.

A few Amazon reviewers were disappointed with the book because the narrative as a whole doesn’t really point readers to a deeper dependence on God. In fact, for a book labeled as “Christian Life / Spiritual Growth” God is mentioned very little. I think this labeling is inaccurate; the publisher should have categorized it as a memoir.

I was a little disappointed that God took a backseat in the narrative. The main message that I received from this book is that the seemingly unproductive waiting places of life can be times of discovery and growth. This is a great message, and like I said, the stories are endearing and a pleasure to read, but I was struck by the fact that if you cut just a handful of sentences from the text, it could easily pass as a secular book that just happened to be written by a pastor’s wife.

Thanks to the publisher’s misleading labeling, The Waiting Place wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. In fact, I already sent a copy to my cousin for her birthday. If you are looking for spiritual guidance from this book, you will be disappointed. If you approach it expecting a collection of beautifully written autobiographical stories, you will no doubt be delighted.

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Note: In correspondence with Eileen after posting this review, she responded to my comments about how the book was [I felt] mislabeled by the publisher. I wanted to post that reply here as it clarifies her vision for The Waiting Place . . .

By the way, I agree that The Waiting Place could have been labeled “memoir,” since I set out to write a book that would find its home with both Christian and non-Christian audiences. I hoped that the non-Christian audience might consider looking for God in unexpected places. And I hoped that the Christian audiences might realize a few things about church, expectations, living that they hadn’t considered before. Some of that is happening, I think. We shall see.

About Eileen Button:

Eileen Button is a weekly columnist for the Flint Journal. Her commentaries have also appeared in multiple online and print publications, including Newsweek and Christianity Today. In addition, Eileen is an adjunct professor of communication. She lives with her family in Davison, Michigan.