Lyn Smith

Book Review - Picking Dandelions

Sarah Cunningham's personality is sprinkled throughout the pages of her memoir,
Picking Dandelions: A Search for Eden Among Life's Weeds.

Her book chronicles her journey through childhood and young adulthood. If you enjoy simple vignettes from other people's lives, you will like this book. 

Sarah shares many of her early church memories with humor and a wink. She then tells of her school experiences, including the football player who liked her, hostile girls who didn't, and her eventual first serious relationship in college.

I appreciate her heart for social activism. She served at a church as Director of Outreach where she planned mission trips and service projects. She organized and took a team of people to Ground Zero after 9/11. Currently, she is pouring her life into students. Sarah doesn't just talk about needs, she looks for ways to meet them. That, for me, is the shining point of the book.

While Sarah openly professes Christianity, this book targets the spiritual seeker. For some readers it will not be direct enough in pointing people to Christ. She intentionally shares more of her experiences than the truth of the Gospel.

She describes her growth and change as a choice but misses the opportunity to elaborate on the Source of that growth and change. For a book intended to take the spiritually "interested" past church experiences and stereotypes, I would have liked to have seen a more direct acknowledgement of God bringing about true and lasting change. Drawing that conclusion could have encouraged readers to seek Him for that in their own lives.

This book was a challenge for me to review. On the one hand it is light and charming. I found Sarah to be delightful. She's smart, funny and knows how to weave colorful stories. On the other, with so many people confused, searching and lost, it falls short of truly sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. That concerns me for every lost person who will invest the time in reading it, only to come away still lost.