Perfectly Unique was written by Annie Downs, and releases on Tuesday.

I love the premise of this book.  I love the idea that we can glorify God with our body, all the time.  I love the concept of bringing glory to God in the everydayness.  This is something that I ideally want to stress with my kids.  I want the naturalness of God to flow in our lives, and up to now, it hasn’t been, because I didn’t grow up with it, so it feels very awkward to talk about ‘spiritual’ things.  I’d really like to get to where conversations about spirituality and seeing God in normal things is normal.

So I plan to start this book with my 6th grader when we go back to school next week, and I’m excited about the conversations that will happen, and hopefully that will turn into normal discussions during the everyday.

I also LOVE that Annie is stretching out the concept of purity beyond the sexual.  Love that.

How can I ask you to honor and glorify an Artist whose work you don’t consider beautiful?

Annie has a very personable writing style that I think girls will easily relate to and enjoy.  I like that she will challenge the girls.  Right off the bat she doesn’t gloss over the fact that hard work will be required.

Learning to love is a process.

The book goes through different parts of your body, exploring how we can praise and glorify God with them.  So with your mind, she talks about making choices with your mind.  She describes an active life, not a passive faith.  I liked her analogy of the mind as a superhighway, with cars of truths or lies, and you can choose which ones to keep on the road.   I think this chapter might be my favorite chapter, actually.  Very helpful, truthful information on Muting lies, Inviting truth, Noticing patterns in your thought life, and Deciding what you think.

The only thing I didn’t like was her statement to decide what you think and stick to it.  Many, many, many of my beliefs have changed over the years, and weighing out your beliefs and discerning them, and letting them change as you grow and change is helpful, and realistic, I think.  I would rather have seen her use the word Discern for the D, and teach girls how to discern their thoughts and convictions and give them to tools to learn how to constantly be evaluating as they grow and change and have new experiences.

This desire for discernment and flexibility continued to be a longing as I worked my way deeper into the book.  (And frankly, why this review has taken me so long to write.  I’ve seen the gif, I know how hard it is to write, let alone publish a book, so of course it’s no fun to write something that isn’t all glowy and happy.)   Every chapter seemed to start out strong, and then stumble down well-worn traditional, conservative paths.  That was disappointing to me.

If we want to honor God with our eyes, we have to choose to see the hurt, the needs, the pain, and the bad that are in our world.

In the section on the eyes, I loved that sentence.  It’s one of my favorite sentences.  But then she ends up talking about how there are things that we have to choose not to see, like movies, books, etc.  Which is true.  There are some books that are unhealthy to read.  But instead of just saying ‘what are your personal convictions about what is ok and what is not ok’, let’s talk about how to arrive at those convictions.  How do we weigh what is good to see and what isn’t?  We can’t just put a label on it and say, R movies are entirely bad, or absolutely no Twilight or Hunger Games.  We have to engage with media in a healthy way, and we have to teach our kids how to engage and discern in a healthy, spiritual way.

In the ears chapter, I had much of the same thoughts.  She talks about how we have to be held to higher standards, and so we need to be careful of what we listen to.  Ok, but how.  There are songs out there that would be blacklisted because they say the F word – Little Lion Man, I’m looking at you – but if you look at the lyrics, at the story, you are engaging with someone’s pain and regret and you connect.  Is that an age appropriate song?  I don’t know.  Probably not.  But for now, thankfully, it goes over my kids heads.

But that is an example of how we need to engage with what we listen to, and not simply cross it off a list if it contains certain things.  She also talks about listening to other people.  To this point I would add, and even prioritize, that we listen to people because they are important, because they are image-bearers, and not just because we’re representing God to them.  

She had a great section in shoulders about hunkering down and being a shoulder for someone to cry on.  Love your friends, even in their hurt, is great and needed advice, especially for teenage girls.  But then in a later chapter she has a sentence about how we all hope to be a godly wife, and it just makes me sigh.

The book has a good premise, I just don’t think it goes far enough in what I would like to see in a book like this.  It did stir up more questions for me, which I like.  I think this will lead to deeper conversations with my daughter.  Questions like, what does it really mean to praise God with our ears?  I don’t think it can be boiled down to ‘trash in, trash out’, so we’ll have to wrestle with that.   How do we discern what things are worth reading and watching?  I just let my daughter watch Downton Abbey, so we can hopefully watch Season 3 live in a couple of weeks.  A line of homosexuality runs through the plot and it even shows a gay kiss in the first episode.  If I was 11, I never would have been allowed to watch that.  Why did I let her watch that?  The issues mentioned in this book are not black and white, and I would have loved a greater depth to the understanding of discernment that is required, and more discussion on how to work through it.

Overall, this book is a mixed bag for me, which is disappointing because I wanted to completely love it.  But, I think it will be a good catalyst for me and my daughter to being talking about all of these issues as she heads into 6th grade.  It’s not a book I would just hand off to her to read, because I want her to go deeper into thinking about all of these issues, and with her at least, it’s not going to happen without a little bit of prompting.  But this book is a much, much better option than other books that are out there, and for that, I am so grateful.