Book Review: Covenant Child by Terri Blackstock

Beautiful, three-year-old twins Kara and Lizzie Holbrooke live a charmed life with their widowed but doting father, Jack. When Jack finds love and marries again, it seems all their lives will finally be “happy ever after.” That new life shatters when Jack and his wealthy parents are killed in a plane crash. Jack’s new wife, Amanda, inherits the family’s estate but fails to gain custody of the twins.

Devastated but bound by her covenant to care for the girls, Amanda manages the estate, hopeful she’ll be able to return it to Kara and Lizzie one day. Meanwhile, the twins grow up in an abysmal home environment with distant family members and become hard-drinking, shoplifting, promiscuous teenagers.

After years of trying to reach them, Amanda is finally able to offer them love, comfort, wealth–the life they have always wanted. But when all you’ve known is deprivation, how can you believe a gift of grace? When you’ve been lied to for so long, how can you ever know the truth?

Intensely involving, emotionally charged, and infused with hope, Covenant Child is an inspiring story that challenges us to embrace the life God holds out to us.

I’m not sure if this is my first book by Blackstock or not, but it won’t be my last.

Lizzy and Kara are twins – heirs to a fortune of near Bill Gates-like proportions. But their young lives are marred by tragedy from the beginning. Their mother died when they were but a few weeks old. Their father eventually remarried a lovely woman named Amanda but before she could officially adopt the girls, he was killed, along with their paternal grandparents, in a plane crash. Their father’s will stipulates that Amanda is to raise the girls but…

She has a fight on her hands.

Enter the maternal grandparents. After only the inheritance, they fight Amanda for the girls.

And win.

Though the maternal grandparents are given the means to provide for the girls from the estate of their deceased paternal grandparents, the girls are raised in a home that most of us would do well to survive, much less thrive, in. Finding their worth in meaningless relationships and cheap thrills, the girls believe that once they turn eighteen, they’ll regain what’s rightfully theirs.

Then they learn the truth.

And like many of us, when it comes to accepting what is rightfully ours as joint heirs with Christ, they have a hard time believing the truth. Especially when it runs so counter to everything they’ve been told since they went to live with their maternal grandparents.

Blackstock does a wonderful job of making us care about Kara [the book is told in first person, present tense, from Kara’s POV], Lizzy, Amanda, some of the boys/men they encounter and even the maternal grandparents. At least somewhat.

It’s not a light, fluffy read but I did smile at times. And cried at others.

The lesson is invaluable and one that I, along with many others, need to learn.

I’ll be looking for the next Blackstock book when it becomes available.

Overall rating: 9 out of 10 stars

Thanks to BookSneeze for a copy of the book in exchange for my unbiased review.