Review: Words by Ginny Yttrup

Title: Words
Author: Ginny Yttrup
Released: February 1, 2011
Publisher: B&H Publishing
Pages/format: 352 (Trade Paperback)
Genre: Contemporary Christian Fiction
Source: I won this book in a giveaway.

Quick Synopsis: Thrown together by Divine design, Kaylee Wren–a traumatized little girl, and Sierra Dawn–an artist with a shameful past discover the healing mercy of Jesus Christ.

From the back cover:

Ten-year old Kaylee Wren doesn’t speak. Not since her drug-addled mother walked away, leaving her in a remote cabin nestled in the towering redwoods–in the care of a man who is as dangerous as he is evil. With silence her only refuge, Kaylee collects words she might never speak from the only memento her mother left behind: a dictionary.

Sierra Dawn is thirty-four, an artist, and alone. She has allowed the shame of her past to silence her present hopes and chooses to bury her pain by trying to control her circumstances. But on the twelfth anniversary of her daughter’s death, Sierra’s control begins to crumble as the God of her childhood woos her back to himself.

Brought together by Divine design, Kaylee and Sierra will discover together the healing mercy of the Word–Jesus Christ.

Quick Review: Ginny Yttrup’s debut novel, Words, is a wonderful story of healing and redemption, and has all the marks of a seasoned writer.

In-Depth Review:

From the first page of Words, Kaylee Wren, the ten-year-old girl at the center of this story, captivated me. With her expansive vocabulary and manners that would make Emily Post proud, Kaylee is the most endearing fictional character I’ve encountered in a long time. In fact, I would say that creating memorable characters is one of Ginny Yttrup’s greatest strengths as a writer. Sierra, Ruby, and Pete are all unique, likable, and expertly developed throughout the novel.

Words consists of sixty-two bite-sized chapters that alternate between voices–primarily Sierra’s and Kaylee’s. There are a few chapters written from the perspective of Kathryn, Kaylee’s mother, but unlike the rest of the book, these are written in the third person. I think this switch from first to third person and back again disrupted the flow of the story the few times it occurred in the second half of the book. Because I had grown used to reading in the first person, I found it a little confusing when the narrative suddenly shifted. Fortunately this only happened a handful of times.

My only other complaint was that Sierra kept called Kaylee “Little One” throughout the story. This really threw me off at first and it seemed out of character for Sierra I had gotten to know. Of all the pet names for a ten-year-old child, this is perhaps the most irritating. After a while I started to skip over it in the text, as though Sierra never said it. I think this was the most glaring fault of the novel, and it stood out so much in part because just about every other aspect of the book was so darn good.

Words addresses the uncomfortable and all-too-real topic of child sexual abuse. Evidently a survivor of abuse herself, Yttrup handles this theme delicately. She does not gloss over the horror of such abuse and the lasting trauma it inflicts on its victims, nor does she come at all close to being graphic. This treatment of such a sensitive subject will hopefully serve to educate readers about the signs and consequences of abuse, which could in turn lead to the saving of a child’s life.

Yttrup also did a brilliant job of presenting the gospel message in a reader-friendly way. I find that Christian novelists in general usually make one of two mistakes when discussing God and the gospel: Either they go overboard and preach a sermon that will most certainly send unbelieving readers running for the hills, or they tack God onto the plot as an afterthought, a sort of genie in the sky that doesn’t even fit well within the context of the story. (The latter is decidedly more common.) There are stories that lack God, there are stories that try to stuff too much of God into too small a space, and there are stories that naturally breath grace–stories where you can almost feel God’s heart beating behind them, even when he is not directly being talked about. Without a doubt, Words is a Grace-Breathing story.

My conclusion? Words is a beautiful story of healing and redemption, one I would recommend in a heartbeat.

About Ginny Yttrup:

Ginny Yttrup is an accomplished freelance writer, speaker, and life coach who also ministers to women wounded by sexual trauma. She also loves spending time outdoors with her dog, Bear, and is a gourmet cook wanna-be. Ginny has two grown sons and lives in California.