Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life by Lauren F. Winner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Girl Meets God” is Lauren Winner’s memoir of her journey from the Jewish faith of her childhood to finding her way to Christianity in college. Growing up, Ms. Winner was raised by her Baptist mother but was allowed to practice her father’s Jewish faith. Her parents were divorced but she felt more connected her father’s religion. Ms. Winner explains that growing up and coming to a head in college, she had a fascination with Christianity. She was so curious that one of her Jewish boyfriends wondered just how Jewish she was. During this period of her life, she decided to officially convert to Judaism. Because her mother was not Jewish, Ms. Winner was not considered Jewish. Not long after her conversion experience, she found herself drifting even more towards Christianity. While studying in Cambridge, she made the decision to be baptized into the Anglican Church.
The book is arranged by the Christian year beginning with Advent. Each season by itself made a lot of sense, but as a whole the writing wasn’t well connected. Because there were a lot of flashbacks and the flow the story isn’t linearly, it was sometimes hard to remember the sequence of events. By the end of the book it still wasn’t clear WHY she was so drawn to Christianity and what went into her decision. At the end of the book it felt more like this was a series of blogs that were put together in a book but I think that more editing is necessary to make this work as a book.