Behind Esther is a book that takes the fact that God wasn't mentioned in the Biblical book of Esther to tell lots of stories about God working in the background of people's lives. The author drives home the argument that just because the reader doesn't hear or see God, that He is definitely working behind the scenes. I'm just not sure you can always jump to that conclusion. Honestly, I was expecting more information about Esther and less about people the author knew or read about.

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book for my honest opinion.

Highly readable and very insightful study of the book of Esther.

The author peppers the book with stories and also expertly links many of the conditions experienced during those ancient times to human experiences today.

I liked that each chapter discusses one spiritual discipline, such as refocusing, sitting tight and so on.

Best of all, he shows that even when it seems that God is absent, He is very much present and in control.

I've always been fascinated by the story of Esther. It's my favorite book of the Bible. I see it as the original Cinderella story. However, though Esther became Queen and her husband saved her people from annihilation, it wasn't always glamorous and glittery. Esther had to move thoughtfully and prayerfully through a world where he people were under the reign of a foreign pagan vast kingdom hell bent on expanding the kingdom through out the world. Persia was one of the great empires of history and being a woman in a man's world where laws favored males as the superior gender and kings could kill or exile his wife for even a seemly small offense,but Esther put her trust in the living God and sought his guidance to help her through this new strange life she was living not by choice but by force yet she found favor with the King. Many things of her world we can find similar in our world today,though it may take different form, we still have similar struggles and we still have the same God in our corner.

This book is amazing. I love how Esther's story is broken down and explained and how we can have our own Esther experience in life. He shows us how to find God in the mundane, the ordinary and normal.

Growing up, God always felt close to me, but as time went on, I grew up and God seemed way more distant. I've found myself asking if God was real for me, like he's real for others and sometimes I felt like I was just met with silence. This book helped me find ways to find God in everything and how He is working to heal and mend each spot in my heart.

Behind Esther was something I was really interested in. I wanted to use it like a Bible study going through Esther but quickly realized that it would not work for me. In a book called Behind Esther, I was looking for Esther most of the time. I struggled to follow the train of thought since the plot was very distracted from the Bible itself. It taught Biblical ideas but there were too many examples that took away from the source material. I did learn some things but it was disappointing overall.

The book of Esther has always been a favorite of mine.

Here we have a girl/woman who is seemingly going to be the lone savior of her people. Except as we read Esther we realize that she isn't speaking to God, and he isn't sending her visions or hints or an active participant at all. And somehow despite being a solitary fighter she manages to save her people.

I took a bible study a few years ago on Esther, as a group we talked about each week's reading. We talked about how faithful Esther was to her people and how her mind was a glorious thing as she thought as a leader. We talked about how unfair the king was, how crazy we thought Vhasti was and how the people that surrounded the king we're worthless, but hardly at all did we talk about how God was working in the background alongside Esther even though we didn't hear him and neither did she.

The reality is that God was working in Esther the entire time, quietly. Just because we don't see, hear or feel God doesn't mean he isn't directing us. It doesn't mean that our trials and tribulations are being taken on by ourselves. Chris Attrock does a fantastic job of pointing out all the ways. that God assisted Esther. Even in the quietest of moments God has a hand in everything. And most of the time we don't even know it..