Spring Book Review #4

I read this book over the last few months. Normally I finish a book in a week but this is a non-fiction, Christian book chock-full of godly advice, Scriptures to aid parents (moms in particular) in raising godly daughters in an ungodly world. I took my time reading this, highlighting points that stood out to me or that I wanted to focus on with my own 2 daughters (1 teen, 1 "tween").
The author is Vicki Courtney who is the founder of Virtuous Reality Ministries and an awesome online magazine for teen girls called virtuousreality.com.
The book is broken up into 3 parts: Preparing for Battle(part 1) with topics about motherhood and counteracting the currant culture.

Part 2 is titled "Battles Worth Fighting" and focuses on the dangers of conformity, defining true self-worth, abstinence, modesty, dating, mean girls....basically many of the things our daughters face in the world and/or church.

Part 3 is "Arming our Daughters for Battle". The author spends much time here discussing our heritage in the Scriptures, prayer and a life of faith. I especially liked her chapter on prayer as it was the way I was raised in my childhood church but in which my own daughters have not been taught as well.....part of that is my husband's and my fault, part of it was the church where we were attending when they were small. I had kind of forgotten the ACTS model until we joined our new church where this type of training your children to pray is stressed. It was refreshing to read this in a book that seems to be very popular with moms of daughters.
I definitely recommend this book especially for those of us who have our children in public or secular private schools. Homeschooled moms would benefit as well, especially if you have daughters who plan on attending secular colleges/universities. It also will encourage you to pray for girls....any girl you personally know. Girls are bombarded by media and many of the things in the media go against our Christian values as we know!

This book can also be a small group Bible study tool: there are questions for discussion at the end of each chapter. I plan on leading a group of moms sometime in the near future, using this book as a major reference.
I recommend this book to all Christian mothers of daughters ages 8-20. Parts of the book came across to me as a little "holier-than-thou" attitude but overall I really liked it. I especially liked her thoughts on dating (probably because they match mine and my husband's!) and I loved how she tied in the Scriptures and the importance of building the Word and prayer in to our daughters' lives.

If you have a daughter younger than age 8, I recommend you get this book and begin reading! It will be a good resource for the teen years!