4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Compelling Journey To God Through Guys, March 10, 2010
This review is from: Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity (Paperback)
Anna Broadway is like many hopeless romantics. Since childhood, she has dreamed of meeting Mr. Right, whom she shaped from the men in sappy novels, romantic comedies, and love songs. And, as she begins to date, she even tries to see how each interested guy could possibly be "The One." But Broadway's story has a twist: this hopeless romantic doesn't want to just find a guy--she wants to find God too. In fact, as Broadway learns, finding God is more important and proves to be more satisfying than the right guy could ever be.
Broadway grew up in a stable household, was raised by loving parents who home-schooled her, and never doubted that she had the so-called "relationship with God," even before she really understood what that meant. However, through her journey to find the right guy, she realizes that she was prioritizing romantic love over love for God. Even as she grows in her relationship with God and seeks His will for her relationships, she continually learns lessons about God and guys that any young Christian woman could both identify with and learn from. Overall, in Sexless in the City, Broadway successfully chronicles the sexless life of a Christian woman pursuing God and waiting for her "Hoped-for-Husband," as she calls him. Broadway's writing is light-hearted but transparent, allowing the female Christian reader to sympathize with Broadway, learn valuable lessons about faith and love, and still enjoy the process. For instance, Broadway shares early in the memoir this lesson concerning her relationship with God: that when she "sought God Himself... he met [her]; if [she] sought just an experience, He let that comfort wither..."-a good reminder to any Christian, as it is all too easy to slip into auto-pilot faith and not actively seek God Himself. These kinds of lessons are seamlessly woven into the fabric of Broadway's life-story. While it does not feel like you are reading a devotional or a self-help book, Broadway's memoir provides almost as much substance and encouragement as books from those genres. Broadway's book is a must-read for young Christian women.
While Broadway claims that the romantic genre of media did not help in her journey through relationships, her book could easily be considered an enjoyable, new breed of romantic comedy--but by the end of this story, Broadway has a her own definition of happily-ever-after: "No matter what the future held, if I found my purpose in seeking God's kingdom, my identity couldn't be shaken." Rather than an ideal life centered around having the perfect man, Broadway learns to seek God first in spite of her desire for a husband. Christian women who feel, like Broadway did, that the only way to learn about love is from romantic movies, songs, and books will find this memoir refreshingly honest about the process of Christian dating. Overall, female Christian readers will learn truths about God, His will for relationships, and how to grow in one's relationship with Him--even without having found Mr. Right.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A saga of searching the wrong way for the right kind of love, May 4, 2008
This review is from: Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity (Paperback)
This book is a "memoir of reluctant chastity." More than that it is a spiritual journey. It is about a woman trying to find God's purpose in her life and develop a working relationship and peace with Him. One of her major obstacles was life's refusal to conform to the romantic script she had written in her fantasies -- find a suitable Christian knight in shining armor as her soulmate in college, get married, have a brood of kids. As the old Yiddish proverb goes, "We plan, God laughs."
When the perfect man doesn't materialize on schedule, Anna Broadway tries various methods of searching out and piquing interest from the opposite sex, some of them merely ineffective, some disastrous, some embarrassing.
The book is probably easiest to read in the beginning, as she reveals her upbringing and personality, her early romantic experiences or lack of same, her obsession with love and romance and sexuality, her conflict between what she expects from God and what He actually delivers.
I found the middle part of the book a little confusing, with too many characters (identified by aliases the author has given them) drawn with sketchy details. It is long on descriptions of feelings and impressions of events that occur -- as it were -- off the stage, and it is short on full conversations and exposition of scenes that would put a reader in the middle of the action. Another reviewer of Sexless in the City wrote that the author should "show, not tell." This is probably the biggest barrier to getting the point across to the reader. This reticence to fully reveal such scenes might have been done to lessen exposure of other people in her narrative. (?) Perhaps a novel format would have better enabled the author to tell her story, with enough fudging of details to maintain plausibly that "any similarity to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental." As a memoir-writer, Anna is hyper-analytical, and we do get a great amount of analysis, but less of the actual people and happenings being analyzed than I would have liked.
The book ends neatly with an epiphany of sorts, brought on not by rejection or romantic fulfillment, but by acknowledging irreconcilable differences between her and one of her most hopeful prospects. How she deals with that letdown is a lesson for Christians in letting go of something less (though deeply desired) to gain something more -- a closer covenant relationship with God. The answer turns out to be faith and trust in God to supply our needs and be our focus, not another human being.
Although this book fatigued me at times, I found it valuable as a story of someone very serious about Christianity, who after many errors (which is how most of us learn -- many, many errors), comes to understand and turn away from things that are in essence idols, or at least weights and distractions. It might be particularly meaningful for young women who are obsessed, as the author was, with the ideal of courtship, marriage, and happily ever after with a real soulmate. I appreciated the author's deep honest thoughts about her conflict with God and how she came to perceive His purposes, while not always agreeing with her interpretation of God's action or inaction. It gave me added incentive for self-examination.
The book may also be an education for men trying to understand at least some of the inexplicable behavior of the women in their lives. How a small thing a man says and does, or doesn't say and doesn't do, can lead to five different and inconsistent interpretations in a woman's mind. In an old Star Trek episode, a space probe scans and describes a human female as "a mass of conflicting impulses." Women are from Venus, but reading Anna Broadway might help the Martians learn a little of the landscape of that alien shore. We can't really understand, but we might become more understanding.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Refreshingly honest!, September 8, 2011
This review is from: Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity (Paperback)
I couldn't put Anna's memoir down. I usually take months to finish a book, but I sped through this one in just a few days (in the midst of usual, busy life). Her storytelling is captivating and draws the reader in--you feel like you're having coffee with her and she's sharing the story of her life with just you. Her lack of pretense makes her appealingly relatable. The climax of her story brings joy as she portrays the very tangible way in which God met her in the midst of very human, very real pain. This is a beautifully transparent story of redemption and hope.
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