Not a Sparrow Falls

Title: NOT A SPARROW FALLS
Author: Linda Nichols
Publisher: Bethany House
2002, reissued February 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7642-0747-3
Genre: Inspirational/contemporary women’s fiction

Mary Bridget Washburn is tired of living life as a druggie’s woman. Her boyfriend spends all his time out in the back shop making “candy” and another man has been eyeing her. Mary knows its just a matter of time before this other man makes his move.
But neither man trusts Mary with money. Maybe they know if she has any she’ll run away. They just give her enough to buy supplies to make meth and no more.

Finally Mary knows the time as come. She hunts around the rusting trailer until she finds the stash of cash from the drug deals, and then runs away, stealing their pick up truck. She abandons the truck in town, and takes a bus to Alexandria, Virginia, where she takes on her mother’s identity and finds sanctuary in the shadow of a decades-old church.

But then a little girl needs Mary’s help, and Mary hopes to help them. Can her past stay hidden long enough for her to give the hope she longs to give?

NOT A SPARROW FALLS was originally published back in 2002, and I’m fairly positive that I read it then, but if I did I didn’t write a review. The book seems very familiar to me. Mary is a desperate woman, tired of living a life on the wrong side of the law, and yet knowing she is too far gone to return to her roots and the innocence she once knew.

The story is very well told, and not so dark as other stories I’ve read. There is an undercurrent of hope in this story, even in the darkness of the beginning, so you know that somehow Mary will be able to dig herself out of the pit she’s in. If you missed this story the first time, you won’t want to skip it now. Pick up your copy of NOT A SPARROW FALLS for an uplifting story of hope. $14.99. 350 pages.