We all need a friend. It’s trite, but it’s true.

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To have a friend who leads you closer to God is nothing short of a gift. I have one such friend. After reading Love & Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters, I realized that, though I’m a writer, I don’t write this dear friend of mine nearly enough.

There’s something personal about letters–they’re not dashed off like email, short like a text, or rambling like a phone call. They remain, full of their original words, to be reread and cherished and, if they’re lucky, saved.

In Love & Salt, we have three years distilled into a few hundred pages and at least a hundred letters (no, I’m not counting). It felt like glimpsing into a personal time capsule, one filled with memories and shared laughter and honest experience.

This book is sincere in the most beautiful expression of that word. You read a part of the two women’s souls, share their smiles and their tears, feel yourself wrenched along lives filled with questions.

They are questions I’ve asked myself. They are pains I have also borne. They are tears I have shared with others.

I have no doubt that, a year from now, I will still be raving about this book. It is one of the best examples of “spiritual memoir” I have ever read, told in conversation and by real people. Except…did I mention that I’m not such a fan of memoirs? Yeah, I should probably mention that. I’m not. But this is…well, it’s more than memoir. It’s an almost voyeuristic look into how a friendship developed and grew into more than simply two women who liked each other. They became sisters in Christ in the very best, most ideal sense of that phrase.

This book reads like real life. In some ways, it’s what I love about blogs and find so rarely in books: the honesty, the bare emotion, the hilarity mixed in. It’s truly a cocktail of love and salt, roses and thorns, sugar and spice.

Highly, highly, HIGHLY recommended.

I reviewed this book as part of the Patheos Book Club. Though I loved the book, I was under no obligation to do so.