Off the Shelf: All That It Takes

Summary: When the ever-cautious Val Locklier moves cross-country with her son for a secure job, everything she’d planned unravels within the first week. After Val reluctantly agrees to rent an apartment from her best friend’s brother, an unexpected chance at an elite filmmakers’ mentorship ignites fresh hope for a dream career. But as Val’s community begins to expand, so do her insecurities, especially those heightened by her growing attraction to a certain friendly landlord.

Pastor Miles McKenzie returns home from a short-term mission trip to discover that not only does he have an intriguing new tenant living upstairs, but he’s also been reassigned to a local ministry on life support. Disillusioned and restless, he distracts himself by throwing his energy into a host of new projects–not the least of which is pursuing Val–without stopping to consider the future.

As Val struggles to stop hiding behind the camera and Miles wrestles with shattered expectations, they’ll find that authentic love and sacrifice must go hand in hand.

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All That It Takes is the second book in the McKenzie Family Romance series, but it is actually the first one I read, and doesn’t need to be read in order to understand the storyline. I picked up All That It Takes as a comfort read, and it was exactly that. I felt right at home reading it and the characters were very relatable. I sometimes get worried reading contemporary books that it will be too “real” in a sense—where it isn’t a break or makes life feel worse–but this story shows the good and the bad and the healthy growth of characters who feel lost and are trying to understand their callings in life. I especially liked how the main characters weren’t young and fresh characters just out of school, but people who have lived life and experienced many things, yet even in a middle-aged season they felt just as lost and confused about their direction in life as a college graduate. It makes the book relatable to those of a variety of ages, and encouragement to those who are struggling to figure out what they should or want to be doing.

For the creative, the homemaker, and the adventurer, All That It Takes has something to offer to numerous audiences. And if you don’t normally read contemporary fiction then this one is still a good one to add to your list. I don’t tend to enjoy contemporary unless it has a good, original plot that doesn’t have unnecessary drama. With it also being Christian fiction I appreciated the fact that it showed people in different stages of faith, not the perfect persona that can easily be written in characters, but raw characters who are learning to depend on God and to listen to His guidance. Miles and Val weren’t perfect, and that is what made it easy to connect with them as they shared and worked through their struggles and differences in their small town.

All that it Takes transports you on a couch curled up with a hot drink in hand as you write and scroll through the computer, a familiar but calm feeling. It brings you into the setting vividly and realistically, but not being so much that it isn’t a safe haven from real life. The pages visit a small cozy town and lets you be the witness to the events with a plot line that is both relatable and healing.