Reviews of Come Forth as Gold and After the Water Brooks by Erica Dansereau

Come Forth as Gold and After the Water Brooks are a duology written by Erica Dansereau. Read my reviews on each below. Content warning: Both books touch on heavy topics including assault and alcoholism though they are treated carefully and approached from a Christian perspective.

Review of Come Forth as Gold by Erica Dansereau

Come Forth as Gold by Erica Dansereau begins in Goldfield, Nevada in 1945 and is a touching story that follows the life of Kitty and Fly from the time they are children until their deaths. It’s a story of finding beauty in the every day, but it’s also a story of brokenness and healing. Erica doesn’t hold back with exposing the ugliness of the human condition, and her characters don’t miraculously and instantly let go of their pain and brokeness. The beauty, however, is that God is presented as the only one who offers true healing. Escaping the brokeness is shown as a process that takes a lifetime and will never become complete until we are made new and fully in God’s presence—a process made possible by Jesus. The faith aspects aren’t huge theological explanations, but they nonetheless point to Christ as the only solution for a hopeless world.

The romance in this story is sweet and hard-earned, like the rest of this story. Kitty and Fly’s love grows over many years but isn’t an easily won prize. Their love isn’t loud pronouncements but everyday acts of selflessness and care. It feels so worth the wait when it gets there.

This book had my emotions up and down as I raced through the book to find the outcomes of the characters’ lives. It is a good reminder that even when life seems so hard and we feel like we’ve failed repeatedly, God is doing a work, and for those who are His, even those ugly things will be made new.

Get Come Forth as Gold here.

Review of After the Water Brooks by Erica Dansereau

After the Water Brooks by Erica Dansereau is the sequel to Come Forth as Gold, and while it’s framed around Kitty’s midlife as the present, the chapters jump back and forth between her past and present and also alternate with chapters from another unnamed woman’s POV. This story is best read after the first to fully understand the impact of the events, both current and past. Like the first book, it beautifully and poignantly captures the ebs and flows of life—living with sinful people and our own imperfections and the ripples they cause in our lives and others around us.

With it including Kitty’s midlife, we see parts of her relationship with Fly more fully developed from young love to a mellowed love between two people who have loved one another through the highs and lows of life. Mysteries and left out events from the first book are revealed that add depth and bring parts of the previous story full circle.

Like the first book, After the Water Brooks also exposes dark places in the lives of the characters but shows how God can bring these things to light and that His plan is bigger than the brokenness we often see surrounding us. I highly recommend both of these books. 

Get After the Water Brooks here.

Blurbs for the books:

Blurb for Come Forth as Gold:

1945. World War II has come to an end. But the battle for a young boy's future is just beginning.

The small, dusty town of Goldfield, Nevada, is all that thirteen-year-old Claude Fisher has ever known. The youngest of three brothers, he spends his days running wild across the desert with his best friend and neighbor, Kitty Ralph. Despite Kitty’s tumultuous home life, they are happy and carefree. Life stretches before them like the flat plains of the desert they call home.

On the cusp of young adulthood, Claude is convinced that their friendship will someday turn into more. But one tranquil autumn evening, tragedy strikes, and suddenly Claude is left holding the pieces of a broken life. 

Stripped of his best friend, Claude’s faith in the God he was raised to trust is shattered. As he navigates a future he didn’t expect, Claude wrestles to make sense of it all. Why does a sovereign God permit tragedy to happen? Is the sinner worthy of forgiveness? And will he ever find hope again after losing the girl he loved?

A sweeping tale of love, loss, and the renewal of faith in the face of tragedy.

Blurb for After the Water Brooks:

Once she was lost, but now she’s found.

1981—Kitty and Claude Fisher have built a good life after leaving the small, dusty town of Goldfield, Nevada. Yet, as her fiftieth birthday approaches, Kitty can’t help but feel something is missing from her idyllic life. It doesn’t help that she and Claude are on a road trip to the Oregon coast to spread her father’s ashes as a final tribute to his legacy. The trip causes old hurts to resurface, as a painful loss brings the past into the present. When she stumbles across a mystery at a coastal retirement home, Kitty allows it to distract her from a deeply buried grief. As her heart becomes entangled within the quaint town where the forest meets the sea, her faith in God’s provision is put to the test when she discovers a secret she could never have imagined.

1937—Lia Monroe is a woman on the run from a shameful past. Yet no matter the future she carefully constructs for herself, her life before and the people she left behind, are never far from her mind. As her heart battles to reconcile the past with a fragile future, she turns to pen and paper to find relief from the memories that plague her. She hopes that someday the truth will set her free, but will she find the courage to make things right before it’s too late?

From the award-winning author of Come Forth As Gold comes an emotional sequel exploring God’s grace and provision as the past, present, and future collide in a story that will touch your heart and spark your faith anew.

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