When Crickets Cry

Written by Charles Martin

Narrated by Adam Verner

From the bestselling author of The Mountain Between Us comes the moving story of a man with a painful past, a little girl with a doubtful future, and a shared journey toward healing for both of their hearts.

It begins on the shaded town square in a sleepy Southern town. A spirited seven-year-old has a brisk business at her lemonade stand. But the little girl’s pretty yellow dress can’t quite hide the ugly scar on her chest.

Her latest customer, a bearded stranger, drains his cup and heads to his car, his mind on a boat he's restoring at a nearby lake. The stranger understands more about the scar than he wants to admit. And the beat-up bread truck careening around the corner with its radio blaring is about to change the trajectory of both their lives.

Before it's over, they'll both know there are painful reasons why crickets cry . . . and that miracles lurk around unexpected corners.

Praise for When Crickets Cry:

“If you read any book this year, this is the one.” —Coffee Time Romance

“Charming characters and twists that keep the pages turning.” —Southern Living

• A Southern Living Book of the Month selection
• Stand-alone contemporary Christian fiction (approx. 85,000 words)
• Also by Charles Martin: The Letter Keeper, The Mountain Between Us, Send Down the Rain, and Chasing Fireflies

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781401606015

Charles Martin

Charles Martin is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author. He and his wife, Christy, live in Jacksonville, Florida. Learn more at charlesmartinbooks.com; Instagram: @storiedcareer; Twitter: @storiedcareer; Facebook: @Author.Charles.Martin.

Reviews for When Crickets Cry

[Sherry Kurtz Hofer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Precious! Well worth reading. You won’t be sorry.

[kim · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Riveting…clean…hearty Christian based beautiful story. Write more…keep going…almost there! Bravo

[lynncrosby0015 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is just an amazing book! I highly recommend it!

[Dena Bivins House · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very touching book that made me cry a time or two. The power of prayer is amazing.

[Alma Quillian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very well written. I enjoyed this book. Unique look at love and the human heart,both as an organ and the soul of a heart

[dianekeenoy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is my first Charles Martin book but it definitely won't be my last! I have already purchased several of his other books and look forward to reading them as well. There's a 7 year old little girl with a lemonade stand doing a very brisk business. She has a large scar on her chest that her sundress can't hide. There's a stranger who recognizes the scar but turns away. When a run away bread truck comes careening around the corner, both of their lives change completely. An incredible story!

[zmagic69 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really like this author.
Outstanding character development and good storytelling.
Like the others I have read by this author the ending is usually predictable but because the writing is so good, it doesn’t matter. How the characters get to the end is where the power of the writing really shines.

[Coreen Zwarts · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved this book very much. And I appreciated the Christian undertone.

[Leah Barton Tew · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not my favorite Charles Martin novel. It’s beautifully written, as they always are, but I couldn’t get past the sappy sentimentalism and the unrealistic portrayal of how the healthcare system works. I gave up on it about 1/3 way through, and I almost never do that no matter how bad the book is.

[misty scott · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written. I enjoyed it very much. Such a sweet story.

[JOLENE RODES · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was disappointed that an otherwise wonderful story was ruined for me by the romance novel aspects of it.

[Lyndy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An Excellent Writer who knows which words to use effectively

[Brenda · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful read. This is my first novel to read by Charles Martin. I wish I had come across him sooner. I don’t know how I didn’t know about this writer. So enjoyed this book. Heartwarming and full of love.

[Helen Garcia · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful story! Very heartwarming with a couple surprises. Loved it

[Carolyn Greathouse · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written and great story telling. I'm adding it to my list of favorite books.

[Thomas Lorenz (Fit For Faith Ministries) · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A book that in parts delights, but also a book that overall greatly disappoints.

PROS
+ Incredible writing skills of the author.
+ Perfect narrative.
+ Captivating story.
+ Superb narrator (Adam Verner).

CONS
- Quote 1: "with every wail I paid penance for the guilt of my soul" (Catholic doctrine, he is speaking of guilt from 5+ years ago)

- Quote 2: "It was there that I realized there were some sins I would never quit paying" (a Christian would never say this)

- The story is declared as Christian, but there is no general theme which God could have made. This story can only serve to create doubts in a Christian, as it paints God as utterly capricious and unjust, stringing together an endless line of suffering:

- his wife died
- he went into a medical profession and quit it, while not being able to save both lives of the women in this story
- years of depression and suppression without any sign of healing from God, or him asking God for help
- his brother in-law became blind
- a girl who lost both parents (missionaries), had a heart desease and endured poverty, prayed for years for her healer, only to die in his arms after a hurricane struck his house. A few months earlier, her aunt lost her house, she who had sacrificed herself during 8 years for Amy.

Can anyone paint a worse picture of God than this? Hardly. I cannot remember to have read such a story, loaded with as many negative elements. I do not need any happy end, and understand well the concept of suffering, but this is not a story of the Christian God. It is misrepresenting God (at best), and reflects an author who has probably a highly problematic relationship with Him.

- The end of the book is very confusing. First the dead Emma appears to him in the hospital. It is described as real appearance; without any indication of a vision. Then the dead Amy also appear to him. There is no account in the Bible suggesting that we can speak with our dead relatives, neither face-to-face nor in a vision.

- The author endorses Augustine as 'Saint', him being the creator of most Catholic doctrines and the patriarch of Calvinism. To quote him is to essentially to quote the devil.

- He heavily endorses the highly problematic teachers John Milton (Paradise Lost) and Mozart (Freemason).

- He endorses Hellen Keller who advocates the teaching that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ had already taken place. Quote of her: "His Providence must needs be universal ... He has provided religion of some kind everywhere, and it does not matter to what race or creed anyone belongs if he is faithful to his ideals of right living."

[charles g hollan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The realization that Annie was still alive and Reese was getting back into medicine

[bereanna · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A heart transplant surgeon goes off the grid for 5 years when his wife dies. Good story. Learned a little if the transplant procedure.

[rmarcin-630843 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely beautiful writing, beautiful story. Reese (Dr. Jonathon Mitchell) is hiding away in GA, when he rescues a 7 year old girl, Annie, who has been hit by a truck. He discovers that she is awaiting a heart transplant, and lives with her guardian, Aunt Cindy, since her parents were killed. Annie has the same heart disease that Reese's wife, Emma, had. Emma and Reese were childhood best friends who grew up and were married. Emma's condition made Reese want to be a heart surgeon, but when he couldn't save Emma, he abandoned his calling. Emma's brother, Charlie, begs Reese to return to his work, read Emma's letters that she wrote to be opened after her death, and to open his heart again. The story is full of love and heart. I highly recommend it.

[carmenmilligan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I like this book of love, life, mistakes and a big dose of God. I didn't realize it was Christian fiction until I got to the library and found it under "I" for inspirational. It was not down-your-throat, but the theme of Christianity was unmistakable. While the plot was predictable, the characters were well-developed and the writing drew me in. By the end, there were tears in my eyes, and an honest surprise at the end.

[momsterbookworm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I highly recommend this 5-star read of a book! It's a love story. No, I don't mean of the romance genre, though there's romance in it. It's a LOVE story -- with a lot of heart, literally, and on many other subtler but profound levels. It's a book, that in one story, paints a picture using the palette of the human condition -- of our ability to love, to alienate, to forgive, to punish (ourselves or others), to hope, to be frustrated, to have closure, and to begin anew. It's a story that will move you to tears or make you choke up, because something in you *will* resonate with the story, associating with one or more of the characters in the book. If you feel nothing (I don't mean that you share the same sentiments as I do for the story), if this story does not touch you in some way, read it again, for you really need a change of heart.

[rainpebble_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin; (5*)I love inspirational books but I do not being preached at. When I began this book I expected it to be a good story but I got much more than I bargained for.This book is one of the finer pieces of fiction I have read this year. It was so compellingly and beautifully written that I found it difficult to put down. This one will tug at your heart strings and make you look a little deeper into yourself; look at your life a bit differently. Perhaps make you count your blessings a bit more. I know I have.The story is about Reese, a man with trying to get away from his past. And it is about a little girl who needs a new heart. Reece meets her as she is selling lemonade at a street stand to earn money to help pay for her new heart. The people of the community know her and her story and are good to come and buy her lemonade. They become friends. It starts out so innocent and sweetly that you are taken for a ride along through this southern community and and before you realize it you are so deep into the story that you want to remain immersed in it.Reese lost his wife tragically and hasn't been able to find his way back to life's mainstream. His budding relationship with this little girl helps him to find his way out of the darkness in which he has been living and reminds him that life does continue on ever so sweetly and tartly just like a lemonade.When Crickets Cry is a beautiful testimony to one man's return to the faith that things can again be good and beautiful. I am happy to have found another author to read and recommend.

[unkletom_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In order for me to review this book fairly I first need address the elephant in the room, namely religion. The author is without question a deeply committed Christian and his beliefs are evident in almost every paragraph in his book. Having grown up in a church-going family I have no problem with Christianity. If Mr. Martin is secure in his beliefs and confident of what lies in store beyond the grave, more power to him. The book he has written is what many call Christian fiction. I choose to call it religious fantasy. I use the word fantasy with no derogatory connotations intended. The author has written a story of the world as he wants it to be; a world without villains; a world where good people always do and say the right thing and bad people sooner or later come around and see the error of their ways. In my experience, such a world can only be found if you turn right at Hogwarts and head straight on till morning. In other words, it’s an imaginary world. If his purpose in writing it is to proselytize, then he really needs to tell a story that is set in a world the reader will accept as real. The plot is about as transparent as a plot can be. Two people with broken hearts, one physically and the other spiritually will, by the grace of god, heal each other. I am not revealing any spoilers that any reader wouldn’t have already figured out had they read the first chapter. The characters are nice, but so incredibly sweet that it’s a wonder they don’t all have diabetes. I also have a problem with the idea that a cardio-thoracic surgeon would believe that the heart is the physical center of our emotions. I know that this idea plays into the theme mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph but it also adds to the sense of unreality and makes it difficult to take the story seriously.I am not saying the author is a bad writer. He’s actually pretty good at stringing words together. When he talks about rowing, I’m reminded of some of the prose from Norman MacLean’s ‘A River Runs Through it’. His description of his wife’s death and his subsequent grieving are really quite moving. In addition, his description of the medical procedures used by cardio-thoracic surgeons in heart transplantation procedures is quite accurate. Bottom line: I read this book as part of a group read even though it is not the type of book that I would choose for myself. If you are someone who does enjoy Christian fiction then feel free to add two stars to my review to balance out my review. I believe the author can write but that he made his job far more difficult by the genre that he chose. As with most fantasies, it is difficult to drum up suspense when the reader knows that the preordained ending can be changed in an instant with the judicious use of magic and/or miracles.This review is based on an unabridged audio recording read by Adam Verner. He did an excellent job of narrating the story although somebody needs to tell him that Robinson Crusoe’s last name is not pronounced ’KUH-roo-sew’ . FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements :•5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.•4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.•3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered good or memorable.•2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending. •1 Star - The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire.

[edward.lorn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The thing about literary fiction, Christian or otherwise, is you have to love the language. To be done right, an author needs to value things like sentence structure, placement of words, and economy of prose. In WHEN CRICKETS CRY, Charles Martin gets two out of three right. His sentence structure is perfect. He manages to build scenes so startlingly real that you can remember them as if they're your own memories. His word placement is brilliant. You can tell he's honed this story down to the most beautiful couplings of words that then copulate and birth vivid visuals. But he's far from sparse. I'm a firm believer that the fewer words used to describe something the better the end result. Especially in literary fiction. Now, this might seem the exact opposite of what most people think of when considering literary fiction (most believing that the genre, by definition, is verbose) but I disagree. I think wordy authors only prove their lack of skill. If it takes you four sentences to describe someone throwing a door open, you've failed at your task. Here, and only here, does Martin fail. Charles Martin likes listing stuff. He wants you to know every single detail down to the brand of every appliance/tool/toiletry used by his characters. Although, sometimes, the brand is all he tells you and you have to guess at what the fuck he's talking about (yes, even though this is a review of Christian fiction, I still dropped the f-bomb, because Hey-Zeus died for my right to be offensive!). The book is bogged down by paragraphs that resemble brick walls slathered with text which have no purpose other than reciting the Sears catalog's chapter on boat-building hardware, or the most boring bits of the New England Journal of Medicine. The author didn't bother with any flair or fireworks during these sections, which led me to believe he might have been copying directly from GRAY'S ANATOMY or BLACK & DECKER DO DALLAS. The prose farted along or was completely none-existent during every list, was basically stripped down to the most commonplace verbiage. Boo! Hiss! *tosses tomatoes at author* This is only so glaringly obvious because the rest of the book is gorgeous. Seriously, I wanted to have this book's babies.

What Martin does best is scene building. He stacks the beginning of every chapter with enough detail so that the hops back and forth in time are not jarring or confusing. Then he lets his characters exist in that space. The dialogue is some of the best I've ever read. These people talk like real people. They react like real people. They love and hurt and breathe and walk like real people. If it wasn't for that, I probably would have deleted this book from my Kindle. Which brings me to...

The fact that I'm an atheist. I'm not even agnostic. I firmly and unflinchingly believe that there is no creator, no invisible man in the sky who grants wishes, and sends people to a lake of fire for not listening to him like some amateur parental figure. Honestly, to me, God and Santa are made of the same thing: fairy dust and children's wishes. That alone should speak volumes as to the quality of this book. Charles Martin makes it very clear, from the first page on, that this book is about the power of God and blah, blah, blah, other religious stuff and things. But, even though I believe in Martin's god as much as I believe in Tolkien's hobbits, I enjoyed this book for the journey, much like I did while reading THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Martin didn't make my belief a necessity, and for that, I applaud him.

SPOILERS OF WAR! (SPOILERS AHEAD)

The ending was... meh. This is personal preference over something that the author did wrong. I do believe that, had Annie died and Reese been able to get back on the horse, so to speak, even though he couldn't save her, the story would have benefited far more. If anything would have proven the strength of the author's faith, that would have. In my eyes, having him save Annie was far too convenient and easy an ending. This is why I don't like happy endings. There's no risk involved, and, for the most part, everyone expects them. In the end, Reese seemed weak because he had to save Annie to redeem himself instead of focusing on his faith to bounce back.

THE END OF SPOILERS!

In summation, this book didn't convert me to Christianity, nor did it try, and I commend Martin for that. He celebrated his faith without being preachy. The author can get long winded where product listings are concerned, but this book is mostly smexy (smart and sexy) prose that makes one want to lick the pages. I kid, I kid... but, seriously, schnozzberries. If you can stomach religiously devout characters and happy endings, read this book for the journey, not the destination.

[judithdcollins · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Another powerful story you cannot put down. (loved the Atlanta/Lake Burton setting), since lived in Vinings, spending weekends at Lake Lanier...and holidays at Lake Burton! Have read all his books and looking forward to his new release-Unwritten. You will want his the entire collection of his work to pass along to your children!" Charles is one of my favorite authors and everything he writes is a winner!"

[nhnick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good story, a bit religious but heartwarming story.

[aegan_13 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In order to add drama to the story the main character who was a heart surgeon left his extremely ill wife alone for 20 hours a day, everyday, while he was being a very important physician. What??? And we the reader are supposed to feel sorry for this "great" guy for all he has gone through.

[ebv-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

By far my favorite Charles Martin book, but I love all of his books. This one has suspense, mystery, love and it sets my heart at peace that prayers are answered, sometimes in the biggest way possible, sometimes in the smallest.

[vvrafters · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jonny has spent his whole life on a mission. He is one of those rare people who knows his purpose on this earth from a very young age. He was born to fix hearts, or more precisely, Emma's heart.From the third grade, every moment of his life has been leading up to one thing, healing Emma. So when things go awry, when he can't save Emma, guilt consumes him. He leaves his avocation and goes into hiding.But God isn't done with Jonny. This is a story of his gradual reawakening, his redemption, and hope. The characters are so real you are left wondering what they're doing now. You cheer for them, cry with them, and hope with them. The human spirit is a miracle of God, and Charles Martin knows.Read it.

[cafischer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that once you start you can hardly put it down. I have now read every book by Charles Martin and haven't been disappointed in any of them. He is a remarkable author, able to keep your attention and I look forward to his next one. I would put him right up there with Nicholas Sparks!