The author is apparently a well-known radio personality. Well, her personality shines in this book of coffee-themed devotionals. She comes across as intelligent and witty, and I found her musings on her coffee addiction to be eerily familiar. Espresso Your Faith is a 30-day devotional. Each starts with some musings on coffee and life, then segues into a discussion of some aspect of Christianity and finishes with a short Bible reading. The writing is solid and the author has a definite voice (I imagine if I’d ever heard her on the radio that I’d easily be able to imagine her reading these devotions).
But it just didn’t work for me. I found some of the remarks overly flippant, and while the introductions were enjoyable enough, I found some of them didn’t ring true: the link between the coffee bit and the Christian bit felt strained, as though she was trying too hard. And the devotional section was hard to read - more paragraphing and white space would have helped (no paragraph should be more than a page long, even on a Kindle).
Some of the devotion titles sounded inane and had me wondering if they were typos (e.g. “Alert to a Connection with the Church —Will the Doughnut Be Unbroken?”), and while I enjoyed the froth, I found the meat (coffee?) hard to get in to. Things improved later, but the style was just not my cup of tea. Or coffee.
Thanks to the New Hope and NetGalley for providing a free ebook for review. You can find out more about Rhonda Rhea at her website.
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