This Isn't Shakespeare

By Stephanie Cardel

Description:

To be or not to be…a professional dancer. Seventeen-year-old Madison is a hopeless romantic who loves quoting Shakespeare and dreams of becoming a professional ballet dancer—a dream she hides, afraid of disappointing her mom and her boyfriend. But when her dreams fall apart, she believes it’s a sign from God that she should commit to her boyfriend and make a new dream.

When she realizes God wouldn’t give her a sign that points her to sin, the happily-ever-after she’s planned crumbles. Now Madison must confront the lies she’s told herself and all the red flags she’s ignored. In the process, she begins to understand that seeking God’s will may not lead to a perfectly scripted ending—but it might just lead to something real.

Book Takeaway:

The biggest takeaway is that God forgives all those who come to Him in repentance, and we need to trust in His plan, accept His forgiveness and live for His glory to find our happily ever after.

Why the author wrote this book:

While teaching abstinence-based sex education and writing an advice column for Daughter of Delight, I encountered many teens and adult women who felt that their sin was too big for God to forgive. They carried around such a burden of guilt, that it kept them from seeking a relationship with God. I knew that my main character in THIS ISN’T SHAKESPEARE was going to have to cross that line and have pre-marital sex to feel that kind of guilt, so that she could model forgiving herself and coming to God for forgiveness. The story takes a realistic approach to a rarely talked about topic: being so caught up in love of a relationship that makes us feel good about ourselves that we lose sight of our relationship with God. With our sex-saturated society, many girls end up in sexual relationships, and when it ends, start believing they aren’t good enough anymore for God to love them. They also romanticize relationships and have trouble recognizing when they are in a toxic relationship, sometimes believing they deserve bad treatment. The story speaks to both of these hard issues like no other.