A Love for Eternity, Janice Braswell (OakTara)

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(Click cover for more information)

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In A Love for Eternity, Janice Braswell crafts a warm story of redemption, self-discovery and love. Drawing from her own family experience of homelessness, abandonment and abuse, Ms. Braswell imbues her writing with an intensity of pathos that permeates every scene, every page, every heartfelt struggle of her heroine--and those who reach out to her.

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Jayden Arman is a veteran of the foster-care system. Growing up in Odessa, Texas, in the home of an abusive man and his alcoholic wife, Jayden counts the moments until her eighteenth birthday when she can escape "the system" to forge her own way in the world. Tethered to her past by her devotion to Emma, a special-needs child who shared Jayden's foster home, she struggles to develop her own identity and capture some sense of self worth.

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Unbeknown to Jayden, Jonathan Baxter, the youth pastor at the church Emma attends, discovers his own tether--a growing attraction for the girl who picks up Emma every Sunday, but refuses to darken the door of the church herself. His pastoral desire for her spiritual need for Christ and his concern for her emotional well being complement, then conflict with, his attraction for the lovely Jayden.

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Jayden moves to San Antonio and stumbles into the life of Daniel Taylor, son of a local landscaper, but, more importantly, a committed Christian with a deep love for mission work--especially in Africa, where he spent a year among the people of a small village near the Zambisi River. He falls for Jayden, too, but would she ever share his zeal for mission work on the Dark Continent?

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Here we go. You ready? Jonathan moves to San Antonio to assume a church pastorate not far from the boarding house where Jayden lives. Uh huh, you see it coming, right? Daniel? Jonathan? Jayden's own search for redemption from an abused childhood and her quest to discover her father's part in her mother's murder, which put her into foster care in the first place? Yeah, I didn't tell you about that, did I? Collision time.

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Oh, you'll want to read this, 'cuz that's all I'm giving you.

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Bravo, Ms. Braswell. Well done!

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