A Distant Shore - She was a child caught in a riptide in the Caribbean Sea. He was a teenager from the East Coast on vacation with his family. He dove in to save her, and that single terrifying moment changed both their lives forever. Ten years later, Jack Ryder is a daring undercover agent with the FBI and Eliza Lawrence still lives on that pristine island. Only now she’s the untainted princess in a kingdom of darkness and evil, on the brink of a forced marriage with a dangerous neighboring drug lord, a marriage arranged by her father. This time when Jack and Eliza meet, both their lives are on the line, and once again, the stakes are deadly high. Can they join forces in a complicated and dangerous mission, pretending to have a breathtaking love…without really falling for one another? Sometimes miracles happen not once, but twice…on a distant shore.
We have dreams. There’s the kind that you get when you fall asleep.
Like, the other night I had an interesting one where I was packing my bag and preparing to jump into a small plane and fly it across the world.
Then there’s living dreams that can come true. One of mine is to write a novel (and maybe to have my own dog one day!).
But the opposite of a dream, I would say, is a nightmare. According to Google, the two definitions of a nightmare are #1, “a frightening or unpleasant dream.”
Once, I had an unpleasant dream where I was being chased down by a bloodthirsty cannibal and my body took forever to wake up. But I was relieved when I finally did, and that it was never real. The second definition of nightmare is, “a terrifying or very unpleasant experience or prospect.” In Karen Kingsbury’s A Distant Shore, Jack doesn’t have the luxury of waking from the nightmare of losing his brother. And unfortunately, it was 20 years before Eliza could escape from her father’s sex trafficking ring. A couple weeks ago, I went to the theater with my family to see the film, Sound of Freedom. It’s the incredible true story of Tim Ballad, a former government agent turned vigilante who embarks on a dangerous mission to rescue hundreds of children from sex traffickers. Before walking into that theater, I knew of sex trafficking and that it was a horrible thing. But the way that film put into perspective the absolute hell millions of children have gone through, literally brought me to tears. A child can be picked up off the street, believing someone to be nice, trustworthy, or good, only to find out later on what horrors were in store for them. But in Karen Kingsbury’s fictional story of A Distant Shore, God uses Eliza to continue to help the FBI, by going and stopping kids from being taken.
Even though this novel by Karen Kingsbury contains made-up characters, sex-trafficking is very real and very active in our world and in our country. I do recommend A Distant Shore to any of our Cross Reference Library patrons, or anyone who is interested about the story itself. But I will say that it is not for the faint of heart, either. While I’m at it, I also recommend that anyone that can, or feels so inclined, go see Sound of Freedom. Sure, it will make you sad for the children it is happening to and mad at the men who do it to them. But that film is extremely powerful, and one of my favorite lines from the movie is, “God’s children are NOT for sale!” And that is absolutely true. I recommend them both, because, though serious, the themes and occurrences need to be addressed and not ignored.