TapestryLAUREL LEE, Lighthouse Trails Publishing, 288 pages, PAPER, $16.95

With a subtitle like The Journey of Laurel Lee and the cover’s stylized illustration of a ship, one might think this book is about a ship’s journey. Instead it is the story of a woman named Laurel Moore Lee Foster Thaler, who had some fame as a writer.

Laurel Lee was a fairly new Christian when she became ill with Hodgkin’s disease while pregnant with her third child. In addition to the physical suffering Laurel Lee endured, she had to go through the failure of her marriage, when her husband left her for their babysitter. Ms. Lee kept a journal of those days and impulsively gave it to a doctor. He in turn sent it to an editor in New York. It became a popular book, Walking through the Fire, which was made into a CBS-TV movie in 1979.

Tapestry tells about Laurel Lee’s marriages, aspirations and disappointments, children, battles with disease, and worldwide ministry as a writer and speaker. If the reader is familiar mainly with an independent Baptist subculture of Christianity, Tapestry will take him or her out of that culture to reveal how a believer in another Christian subculture related to God and His Word and the trials of life.

There are aspects of Laurel Lee’s life that a Regular Baptist may find puzzling. Nevertheless, she worshiped the same God, had a personal relationship with Him that sustained her through horrible times, knew His Word, and served Him in the broader Christian world. Ms. Lee went Home to Glory in 2004. This book will probably be most beneficial for readers battling a disease.

 —Jonita Barram, Reviewer