Hope in the Storm

About the Book

Sandra and Marisa are Christians and university students; they are best friends. They are involved in church activities, study, and sometimes hold down jobs too. Marisa comes from a very dysfunctional family, and Sandra “Sandi” didn’t have a great family life either. Their lives in college run fairly smoothly, though, until another student, Gwen, befriends Marisa. Gwen struggles with her body weight and has just started a new diet. Marisa tries to offer moral support but ends up getting caught up in the dieting craze herself. Long after the brief friendship with Gwen ends, Marisa continues to diet and loses more weight. People become concerned. During a particularly lonely Christmas break, she falls off her diet and can’t seem to get back on it. She gains most of the weight back. A pattern of binging and dieting follows, which leads to great distress and to efforts to try to solve “the food problem.” Throughout all of this, Sandra tries to be helpful and understanding. She listens, is nonjudgmental, and offers advice. Marisa also tries to get help at church, though the pastors claim to be too busy to talk to her. She makes an appointment with a nutrition doctor, but that doesn’t yield long-term positive results either. Eventually, through a combination of daily morning prayers and behavior modification, Marisa manages to get the problem under control – she reduces the frequency of her binges, and finally cuts them out. Her weight drops again to a low level, which she is happy about. As far as she is concerned, the food problem has been solved. Yet it doesn’t make her happy. She and Sandra graduate with their degrees in December. Shortly thereafter, during yet another Christmas break, Marisa commits suicide by swallowing cyanide with a glass of water. As her death hits the news, soon the whole college town knows. The rest of the novel is about how Sandra tries to cope with the pain of having just lost her best friend. She also deals with some guilt as she wonders if she could have done anything differently to prevent Marisa’s death. She also questions God’s part in all of this, after all, she’d been seeking Him the whole time and had done the best she could to be a good friend to Marisa. After going through a rough period, she concludes that God is faithful, even when she doesn’t understand why certain things happen, and that there is always hope.

About the Author

Corinna Parker lives in Tennessee. This is her first published novel. She wrote it over a five-year time period, from 2002 to 2007.”