Love reading about how someone’s story about how they got to where they are. Along with the heart ache it must take you through. The story is his journey and thankful for the insight to be able to share it and learn from it.

Thank you to the publishers and to NetGalley for an electronic ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Many who were raised in Christian homes from my generation grew up with Philip Yancey’s books as staples in the home library. This memoir gives context and potency to Yancey’s words on grace and the problem of pain in his other books. I anticipate this might be a frustrating read for some (particularly Christians) who want miracle redemption story with a bow on top. You won’t find it here, but I was much more moved by the fundamentalist raised skeptics who met God and experienced His grace despite the ongoing messiness, confusion, and hurt in life.

I closed out 2021 with this memoir. It’s an unflinchingly honest reflection on Yancey’s childhood. He refers to it as a prequel to his other books, and this makes so much sense. This is a beautifully-written tough read that is relatable to anyone who grew up in a super-conservative environment. I’m thankful for Yancey’s reflective approach to this memoir-he recognizes the pain and hurt of his upbringing without an undertone of bitterness. I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time.

I've read a book or two by Philip Yancey, and I most associate with his honesty and willingness to take on tough topics like doubt. But this book was very hard for me to read. I grew up in a similar environment of strict religious fundamentalism. God was always looking down to punish, not love. And strict parents ruled with fear and volatile emotions. While I enjoyed the writing style and pace of the book, the content triggered me and made me feel lots of emotions like anger, shame, and regret. It also reminded me that I am on a healing journey, and the hard work is worth all the effort - for both me and my children who will have more freedom than I had as a child. We're doing a good work here in our home!
I'm grateful for Yancey's willingness to write his story and share truth about his upbringing. His mother suffered trauma and abuse as a child and never found healing, which means she took out her pain on her boys. Yancey's father died of polio from his desire for a faith healing, which further rocked his mom's world and affected his life.
This book deals with various challenges, including religion and racism. It's an important book that ignites freedom and shares redemption.

I was surprised that Yancey's upbringing was very different from what I would've expected. I don't know if I "liked" the book, but I learned a lot and found it interesting.

This memoir dives into what it means when you thought you knew your history but nothing is as it seemed.

Phillip thought he knew the true story of his parents and where their religious beliefs came from but one news article that he accidentally found proved everything he knew as false.

He questions his entire life and everything he once held true. This memoir is one of Reality, Hope, forgiveness and finding the gift of grace in every day.

Thank you #convergentbooks and #NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review

Growing up, he never knew how his father died, let alone the painful secrets about his eventual termination. Digging through his family history from an old scrapbook, he learns about the terrible polio disease that hits close to home. Raised in a poor neighbourhood, who would have known that he would grow up to become one of the most cherished writers in the American evangelical world. While many writers and famous persons write their memoirs first before launching their writing careers, Yancey seems to reverse the trend. Most famous for his books such as "What's So Amazing About Grace" and "The Jesus I Never Knew," after a few decades of writing about spiritual matters, he devotes his latest book to share about his own life journey from boyhood to the present. With a sharp eye for poignant details, he reflects on his past with brutal honestly with subtle hints on how he would have lived any differently. With hindsight from the tragic loss of his dear kitten, he might have second thoughts about getting a pet. With a penchant for details and a creative prowess for storytelling, Yancey is able to help readers put themselves in his shoes. One humorous way is in how he describes a mealtime with food he disliked, such as eating tomatoes. He tells about his experiences living in the South and having first-hand witness of the ugliness of the racial tensions. Moreover, his very own family doctor was a high-ranking member of the KKK! These together with personal details about his family background give readers insights like never before about one of the most celebrated authors in the evangelical world.

From childhood to high school; college to his own brother's bad experience at a Bible college, he shares his gradual shift out of his fundamentalist church upbringing. It was a difficult journey that sets the stage for his insights about grace. He devotes some detail about how his path diverges from his brother Marshall. Two brothers went to Wheaton but ended up on different paths of faith. Even his own writing career has its moments of difficulty. Once, his own mother was unhappy when he published Soul Survivor which painted a poor light on Southern fundamentalism. This memoir might reopen old wounds, something which the author would have anticipated but still felt the need to share in writing. I sense that in the revelation of such intimate details about his own relationships with his family and his Church upbringing, this memoir might very be his own journey of acceptance and healing. He confesses how this book was conceived over 50 years ago, only to be published much later.

My Thoughts
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Philip Yancey is one of my favourite authors. It is not simply the content of his books that captures my interest, it is also the way he writes. With penetrating truth and open honesty about his own life, he shares his own story in this powerful memoir from the unknown past to today's present. As the author of one of the bestselling books on pain and suffering, "Where is God when it hurts?" his own life is a real-life demonstration of his own grappling with what he wrote. It reminds me of the popular maxim, "Hurt people hurt; Healed people heal." In this memoir, Yancey does not hold back on his past but seeks to know, understand, and reconcile his history with the grace of God he has often taught about.

Why should anyone read this book? For sure, those who loved reading books by Yancey would pick this book up without a second thought. After all, if readers have been blessed by his earlier books, why not read about the author of such great works! Knowing more about the author could very well give greater insights into the spiritual works of this popular author. Those who are totally new to Yancey might see this book as a launchpad into his other writings. I remember that Yancey himself once lamented on a changing reading climate, that not only is there a decrease in people buying books, there is also a shrinking interest in Christian literature. Like how the author has dealt with change in his own life, we too will need to learn how to deal with changes in our modern world. We need not be afraid to approach our own backgrounds with brutal honesty. If Christ is our Redeemer, surely, he can redeem not only our lives, but our past as well. Yancey knows it and in this memoir of openness, he shows us that he is not afraid of his own past. It is for this very reason that he is able to tell of his own life without fear and with great faith.

Philip Yancey is the author of over thirty books, including The Jesus I Never Knew, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, and Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church. Yancey’s books have garnered thirteen Gold Medallion Book Awards from Christian publishers and booksellers. He currently has more than seventeen million books in print and has been published in over fifty languages worldwide. Yancey worked as a journalist in Chicago for some twenty years, editing the youth magazine Campus Life while also writing for a wide variety of publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Christianity Today. In 1992, he and his wife, Janet, moved to the foothills of Colorado, where they live now.

Rating: 4.5 stars of 5.

conrade
This book has been provided courtesy of Convergent Books and NetGalley without requiring a positive review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.

Where the Light Fell is a raw portrayal of Philip Yancey's upbringing and the extremism of religious fundamentalists. Sometimes unbelievable, and other times quite sad, this memoir brought to life Yancey's experiences and opens readers eyes.

If you've read Yancey's other books, reading his memoir will provide you with the back-story to most of the questions he has addressed in his writing over the years. I appreciated and respected the many books he has written and nearly always found them to be very relevant to my own doubts, questions, and challenges of the spiritual journey I found myself having as an "Evangelical" Christian. (I no longer consider myself an Evangelical). I recently listened to a very enlightening interview Kate Bowler had with him on her podcast, "Everything Happens." I listened to it after reading his memoir and it made me appreciate Philip Yancey even more as a fellow brother on this spiritual journey. If you're interested in listening to her interview, you can do so at https://katebowler.com/podcasts/philip-yancey-the-scandal-of-grace/.

At points difficult to get through as a non religious person but overall thought provoking and engaging.

Philip Yancey does not shy away from his fundamentalist upbringing in this memoir of losing his faith and then returning to it. I identified strongly with his upbringing and later with his quest to talk to those who had influenced and understand what exactly was going on around him when he was growing up. While we are on different sides of the understanding of God, going back and trying to understand the past is definitely something I relate to.

For forty years, Philip Yancey has been exploring faith through his writing. He’s won the ECPA Book of the Year twice for The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace. He’s influenced millions with his thoughtful insights in publications like Christianity Today, Reader’s Digest, and more. And through it all, you can see how Yancey very specifically picks on some of the most sensitive areas of faith, combating legalism, questioning suffering, and dealing with Christian hypocrisy. While Yancey has inserted personal anecdotes into his books, he’s always written them like a journalist—he’s objective and separate from the issues he obviously cares and writes passionately about.

Where the Light Fell is a memoir that brings all those thematic elements into focus through the perspective of Yancey’s upbringing in a very rigid and fundamentalist home and church. The opening scene is set with his father’s death from polio. What Yancey didn’t know until adulthood was that his father had demanded to be released from his iron lung machine confident that God would supernaturally heal him.

Mrs. Yancey was left a young widow, alone to raise two children, her hopes of being a missionary dashed with the death of her husband. The faith she followed tended to the extreme and Yancey dives into an exploration of childhood in the 1960s as the son of a fundamentalist Bible teacher. Through his life, Philip is able to offer a unique look into a rather unique time in church history where a specific brand of evangelical Christianity was taking root and being practiced.

Yancey’s relationship with his mother is a large thread that weaves through the book’s chapters. Some very painful memories are revisited as he tries to present his mother’s complexity—her love for Jesus and her abusive temperament—not to make any sense of it, but just to share it as it was. His relationship with his brother becomes a large part of the latter half of the book as sort of a contrast to Yancey’s path his life. His older brother went down some very destructive paths, burned a lot of bridges, and has disavowed faith completely because of the upbringing they both had. Philip uses his brother’s story to show how two people with similar backgrounds can have such different reactions to the same things.

Outside of the relational, Yancey also speaks to major social issues of his time, racism in particular. In fact, it was his own changing views on race—the result of being exposed to others of a different race for the first time—that began to tear down the fundamentalism that he’d been indoctrinated with.

Where the Light Fell sheds light on why Philip Yancey has taken the career path he has. The things he explores and questions he asks all stem from the destructive form of faith he grew up with. His story offers perspective on a pivotal moment in church history as the fundamentalist/evangelical church began to be more entrenched in politics. You get a feel for how some of these rural fundamentalist churches operated in the South in the mid-20th century and the fears they had about the future.

And when you think hard enough, you can see how much of that history is playing out today as fundamentalism/evangelicalism continues to politicize faith, question science, and fear a loss of power and influence. In many ways, the events of Where the Light Fell could be easily updated to today and all the themes would still fit. Through Yancey’s eyes and life, we are invited to see where the church has grown, where it has regressed, and where it has stayed stagnant. Though it’s not explicit, Yancey’s message appears to be directed toward so many evangelical young people who are now questioning their faith and deconstructing from the toxic elements they grew up with. That message is this: There’s a Jesus outside of fundamentalism, a Jesus of grace and love and healing. Look for where the light falls and go there. There is a way out and a way forward.

Where the Light Fell is a beautiful work that reflects on an interesting life from one of Christianity’s most well-known writers. Through light and darkness, hill and valley, Yancey takes us through the faith journey of his life, into the places where the light fell. For some, it’s a expose of fundamentalism; for others, a Gothic southern coming-of-age tale; and for some it’ll be a comforting hug of quiet solidarity and a whisper that they aren’t alone in their struggle.

Whether it's his own story, that of another's, or taken from scripture, Yancey finds a truth in it that points us to God. For years, Yancey's books have made a big impact on me, and I'm thankful he pulled back the curtain so we could better understand the richness of his faith.

This is a powerful memoir of growing up in a fundamentalist church and the detriment that it can cause. The stories contained within are deeply sad, disturbing, and relatable. Phillip tells some very hard truths about relationships, abuse, and mental illness. He also takes the reader on a journey toward grace that is profound. It has helped me to see some things in my family for what they are.

This book was great! I highly recommend it. It was a non stop page turner! For sure will read more by this author!

Giving this four stars for the fascinating and compelling look at Yancey's early years. Because I'm not a follower, I've not read his other work, but this sounded fascinating to me, to see how the groundwork was laid in a life like his. The reflection on how his father's life ended is timely, in our current pandemic era. I will admit to skimming the last 10 to 15 percent, as that went into his current faith and practices in more detail, but overall a very interesting look at extreme fundamentalism and the effect on family dynamics.

Where the Light Fell by Philip Yancey

Years ago my mentor led a church book study on What’s So Amazing About Grace by Philip Yancey. I was struck by the concise, direct, but gentle writing. Yancey tackles difficult theological questions, particularly ones hurting people may struggle with. He takes difficult concepts and explains them in a practical way everyone can understand. I wondered how does one learn to write, think, and care about people like this? Where the Light Fell: A Memoir answers that question.

Beginnings

Yancey begins his memoir with his father’s tragic death, which haunts his family and leaves them in perpetual poverty. His father and mother had dreamed of being missionaries, and his father’s death leaves his mother asking God why. She never remarries and in a dramatic graveside proclamation places the weight of living up to that dream on her young sons.

Yancey may write the memoir from his perspective, but it is as much a story about his brother Marshall as it is about Philip. Their mother raised them in a southern, strict fundamentalist home in the turbulent 1960s outside of Atlanta. He recounts in vivid detail what that was like in home, church, and school.

“An upbringing under a wrathful God does not easily fade away.”

He and Marshall both faced all the issues of that highly volatile cultural moment. Add to that their mother’s fundamentalism and bitterness, and you get what Yancey calls “toxicity.” He recounts his first realization that he has been raised racist and his first realization that he’s what others call “white trash.” He ponders what their fundamentalist church has been preaching.

Marshall bears the brunt of his mother’s demands and exceptions. Both boys are exceptionally bright, but Marshall is a borderline genius and a musical prodigy. It’s not until they both are in a Christian college with some separation from their mother that the wounds really begin to fester, and the search for meaning begins. The two boys find very different ways to move forward and attempt to heal.

“The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”

Where the Light Fell is a page turner. Yancey’s writing is like sitting in the backyard around a fire listening to a friend tell stories. There’s just something simple and beautiful about it. Yancey calls Where the Light Fell a kind of prequel to his other books.If you’ve ever read Yancey’s books, this memoir explains so much about the suffering and grace he makes his themes. If you haven’t read his books, this memoir will make you want to.

I’m not sure why but I had a hard time getting through this book. I normally love all of Phillip Yancy’s writings and while this was a heartfelt and I’m sure painful retelling of his story I found it difficult to read. Difficult doesn’t mean bad. Anything PY writes will be and is great just maybe not for me at this time.

This was a struggle for me to begin with. I haven't read a lot of Yancey's books but I was fascinated to read an account of a prolific Christian author's walk with the Lord. What I struggled with at first, well for much of the first half of the book was the emphasis on Yancey's early years and the amount of detail provided. I wasn't convinced I needed to read so much detail of his fundamentalist upbringing and its impact on his young life and that of his brother, Marshall. In addition, I grappled with the picture I was being presented with of their mother and how it grew in its severity. I wasn't sure if that was fair to her being put in the public eye in such a difficult and at times negative light.

I kept wondering when Yancey's story was going to take off. When would he experience Christ in a way that would change his life and take it out of the challenging environment Yancey lived in for much of his first 20 years?

And then it came. And in a very dramatic way. The skeptic experienced Christ using his imagination on reading the parable of the Good Samaritan. I couldn't put the story down from that point on.

Suffering and Grace. The two great themes of Yancey's writing reflect his life. He tells us this at the end and for much of this memoir we read the sufferings of his mom, Yancey and especially Marshall. It's confronting at times and terribly sad.

And then there's grace. Lots of it.

I thought we'd read more about his writing and his adult years but much of the latter are still reflections on the impact of his early years, even to the extent of Yancey feeling led to apologise to many that he hurt in those formative times. More grace.

This isn't a memoir for everyone. There were many times I thought of packing it in as I tired of story after story of the impact of the southern fundamentalist beliefs of his mom on the two boys. But I realise at the end that we have to read that to better understand the wonder of grace and how both the suffering helped shape the man and allowed for him to discover that wonder so he could minister so effectively to others.
And I made peace with how Yancey presented his mom too.

I received an early ebook copy from the publisher via NetGalley with no expectation of a favourable review.

Where the Light Fell reads equal parts intriguing fiction as it does memoir - it's engaging and detailed and thought provoking, and makes you question your own origins and why you think/feel/believe the way you do - and how that came to be the case.

What beliefs did your family have in general, and about you specifically? What story did you have to live up to? Why? Have you ever thought of what your life (or that of your parents) would be, had things been just a little different? What did they have to do to survive?
This is what Philip Yancey explores, diving into not only his quest for approval and faith, but his brother's rejection of the ideology, choosing instead to escape via various drugs. One upbringing, two very different paths.

Not my typical style of book, so it did take a bit of work to get through, but found it engaging and thought provoking.