Divine by Karen Kingsbury

★★★★★
Mary Madison was a child of unspeakable horrors, a young woman society wanted to forget. Now a divine power has set Mary free to bring life-changing hope and love to battered and abused women living in the shadow of the nation’s capital.
 
Mary is educated and redeemed, a powerful voice in Washington, D.C. - both to the politically elite and to other women like her. But she also has a past that shamed polite society. Her experiences created in her paralyzing fear, faithlessness, addiction, and promiscuity. At the crossroads of her life, only one power set Mary free and gave her a lifetime of love and hope. A power that could only be divine.
 
Peggy Madison is Mary’s grandmother, a quiet woman who has spent her life praying for her granddaughter. Peggy clings to the belief that God has a special plan for Mary. Through years of sorrow and longing, Peggy walks the journey in faith and watches from a distance as one key person after another comes into Mary’s life and demonstrates the timeless, powerful love of the Master, the Savior. The divine Lord.
 
Emma Randall is a single mother fleeing an abusive relationship, wondering whether there is hope for her and her young daughters. She is desperate, broken, and unloved, tempted to commit the unthinkable. Then Mary Madison introduces Emma to the greatest love of all, greater than any either of them has ever imagined.

Wow, Divine was a really intense book.  When the book overview mentions "unspeakable horrors," it's not exaggerating.  Divine was written as a parallel to the story of Mary Magdelene from Scripture and the seven demons she dealt with.  The modern Mary of this book certainly faces her seven demons as the book delves into heavy topics such as prostitution, sex slavery, abuse, and more.  As dark as these topics are, this book is NOT explicit in any way; however, Kingsbury certainly leaves no question as to what the women in this book deal with.  Parts of it are certainly hard to read.  But it is a story of finding the all-encompasing and redeeming love of Christ, a love that is Divine.  It's a very good book, reminding us that whatever sins we have committed, even if they are unspeakable, and whatever is in our past, we are made alive and anew by Jesus and His sacrifice.