Becoming Mrs. Lewis was the book club choice for June. I ordered this book about six weeks ago when it was first announced and and after it arrived, I left it sitting on my shelf. I picked it up once and started to read it, but I just could not get into it. Ugh, I thought. I really enjoy my book club, so I hate to go to the meeting without having read the chosen book. I feel like it’s an affront to the hostess to not have really tried.

So, last Saturday, two days before our monthly meeting, I picked it back up to try again. This time I did what I often do: I started skimming, but much to my delight, about a third of the way through, I was hooked. It does have a little more detail about things that I would like and I still did a little skimming, but I finished it and I’m glad I did.

From Amazon:

When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis–known as Jack–she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford professor and the beloved writer of The Chronicles of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters.

Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, found a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy.

In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest love stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren’t meant to have a voice–and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn’t know they had.

At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, Becoming Mrs. Lewis is above all a love story–a love of literature and ideas and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.