Tethered by Eleanor Bertin {Book Review}

**I received a complimentary copy of this book for consideration. All thought are 100% my own. 

Perfectionistic librarian Jacqui Penn is ripped up by the roots when she’s dumped by her longtime boyfriend. Rootless and on the run, she is drawn two thousand miles west across Canada to the last place she ever thought could offer stability—the old homestead where her father grew up.
Renovating the derelict house soon becomes a personal battle as it stubbornly resists her efforts. While Jacqui struggles to renew the home, she spends time with the family Pops bitterly resented. Her hunger for roots grows stronger as she fights to discover the long-buried reasons her father fled the house as a beleaguered teen. But will she ever find the belonging she craves?

   In a fit of optimism at age eleven, Eleanor Bertin began her first novel by numbering a stack of 100 pages. Two of them got filled.
     Eleanor holds a college diploma in Communications and worked in agriculture journalism until the birth of her first child. The family eventually grew to include seven children, all girls except six. Writing was crowded out by homeschooling a houseful for 25 years until Lifelines, her first completed novel, was shortlisted in the 2015 Word Alive Free Publishing Contest.
     Eleanor and her husband live with their youngest son, who has Down syndrome, amidst the ongoing renovation of a century home in central Alberta. She blogs about a sometimes elusive contentment at jewelofcontentment.wordpress.com

 Tethered is the 12th book in the Mosaic Collection, a collection of unrelated novels by various Christian authors, all with beautiful themes of faith. As such, this can certainly be read without having read previous books in the collection.

In Tethered, we meet Jacqui. She has just gotten out of a long term relationship, and is heading back to her father's hometown where a relative she's never met had left her a house. When she arrives, she finds the house in dire need of TLC, throughout the story we follow along as she rehabs the house--- and her life too. Growing up in a home without faith and not knowing her distant relative, she is searching for those things that she is missing in her life. Will she find that it the hometown that her father had left behind without a glance back?

Tethered is definitely a bit different as far as Christian fiction is concerned. There is mention of a same sex couple, one of the characters is an author of erotica, etc. While these particular characters are not primary focuses of the story and there isn't any major detail given, I was admittedly a bit shocked when I came across that first bit as it's not typical in a Christian novel. I did find that these lifestyles were not glorified in anyway though. These are issues that exist in our world today, so it certainly gave the story some realness to it. That said, it is important to note as some more conservative readers may not like that.

Overall, this was a really good story with strong messages of faith and family. There was also just a bit of romance thrown in, but it was quite minimal so those who don't prefer romance would likely still enjoy it. If you enjoy a good story of coming to faith, this is certainly a unique story to check out.