His name is James. He was the brother of Jesus Christ. The Brother's Keeper is a story imagined from the few known facts of the life of a real man. The book tells the story of the latter part of Jesus' ministry, up through his death and resurrection, as seen through the eyes of His own family. Tracy Groot takes readers, with James, on a journey from unbelief to belief as James grapples with the question of who Jesus is.
Tracy began her writing career at age 8 by starting stories and never finishing them. She finished them only under duress for school. In school, she wrote stories and collected a few writing awards and had an idea she'd be a writer when she grew up, but funny thing happened on the way to college: she became a Christian. She then had a misguided notion she had to swap writing for this new life she was grateful for, so she threw out the stories and went on with Life.
One day, our hero (Tracy) was working as an accounts payable clerk in a big corporation. She wrote and circulated office memos because they were more interesting than data entry. She had an epiphany: she'd rather write. She finally got it into her brain that God was not a sicko meanie-head and gave her the desire to write for a reason. She got the heck out of Dodge, and landed a job writing radio commercials.
Tracy wrote commercials for a year, quit to have a baby, and didn't return to the writing job because by then she'd gone past fetching back into the kind of writing she really wanted to do: books. She didn't buy it when a famous writer said to her face that she'd first have to write magazine articles to pay the price for writing books. She lied politely and said she'd get right on it, but once the famous writer was gone she took to her computer and wrote what she wanted, not stupid articles.
Tracy heard of a writing conference nearby, the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing. Without a clue for what she was doing-and she's discovered since then that clueless works if you're persistent-she threw together 3 chapters and a synopsis, signed up to talk to a few editors, and sold her first books, two young adult novels in a series called, Casey and the Classifieds. The books did okay for a few years. Then they went out of print, a stupefying notion that never occurred to Tracy. But Tracy wants to think she's like a particular Rich Mullins lyric, shaken forward and shaken free, so she didn't let it get her down and went looking for other stuff to write.
Tracy was then asked to write a play about James, one of the brothers of Jesus, named Consider It All Joy. She liked the play so much she turned it into a novel. She got an agent (long story) and her agent sold the book as "The Brother's Keeper". It got a starred Booklist review. She thought, "This is fun, I'll try again" and wrote "Stones of My Accusers". It also received a starred Booklist review. After that came a book called "Madman", a story about the Gerasene demoniac. It got a starred Booklist review, a starred Publishers Weekly review and was awarded the Christy Award for historical fiction (2007). After Madman, she worked on a couple of story projects, did some ghost writing and picked up some interesting freelance work.
Tracy's soon-to-be-released (June '12) book "Flame of Resistance", published by Tyndale, tells the story of the Old Testament character Rahab the harlot in a WWII, D-Day and Normandy setting - Fighter pilot gets shot down, infiltrates a brothel and plans to get intel out of the country through Brigitte, a prostitute rumored to be sympathetic to the Allied cause.
Tracy's current project has a working title of "Jonah Girl" and should be a whale of a story.
On a personal note, Tracy's favorite place is the Mackinaw Bridge - cause it leads to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Mackinaw Island, Whitefish Point, Pictured Rocks, the Porcupine Mountains, pasties, fudge and immense beauty. On the homefront, her predominantly male household includes her husband Jack, three sons, Evan, Grayson, and Riley, and a manipulative Jack Russell named Murphy.
Tracy's character flaws include anger when beaten at chess (she says John Huss, one of the forerunners of the Reformation, had the same problem so she doesn't feel so bad), procrastination, and jumping to conclusions. She'd like to visit Australia someday and hang with her friend Sharon. And then New Zealand, too, so she can find some Lord of the Rings woods and run through them like Frodo on a mission.
