Behind the Lights: The Adventure of a Mum and Her Family by Helen Smallbone Book Review

In Behind the Lights, Helen Smallbone has written an autobiography about her life and her family. She has been more behind the scenes instead of on the main stage. In the book, she shared how she come to know Christ. She explained the story of how she met her husband, David and they had a total of six kids, two daughters and four brothers. They lived in Australia. She went into great detail about his history and how he began to work in the Christian community as a concert promoter. He worked with Petra, Stryper, Carman, Whiteheart, and a few others. She was very real in sharing the story of the three closed doors they faced as a family. She explained how her husband was good at budgeting and planning and promoting the shows. He really wanted to bring one Christian artist over and the tour ended up costing them a loss of $250,000. They were down about 40% and the touring manager and their team could care less. They pretty much told him he signed a contact and laughed in his face. She explained how these three closed doors led them into moving to America. She revealed her family work ethic and how they would all work together to make ends meet. 

 

 

In the book, she shared how Rebecca St. James got her name and how she got signed as a Christian, recording artist. David became her manager. She explained the touring side and how each of her brothers would help out in different ways. She explained why Rebecca only went to ten grade and how she felt God tell her that it would be okay. And it turned out it was. Rebecca has since released ten albums, wrote a dozen books, and starred in eight movies.

 

 

Another part of the book was looking at the story behind for Kings and Country (Luke and Joel) and how they received their name. She revealed how God brought them into performing together when Joel at first wanted to be a solo act. They wanted to at first go the secular music route and then things changed and they went into Christian music. 

 

 

I would recommend this awesome book about the whole family of the Smallbones. I enjoyed reading more about Rebecca St. James and for Kings and Country and their family story told by their mother. I liked how she also touched on Luke’s health crisis and his wife’s struggle with being addicted to an anti-nausea medication. I also liked how she opened up about how God provided for her family when they experienced hard times. One person even gave her family a Toyota. This story was very heart touching. I also connected with reading about their sister, Libby and her battle with Lyme disease, which went undiagnosed for six years. I too have suffered from this disease and it took years for me to recover. I felt many of the same symptoms she had, horrible headaches, body aches, and tired all the time and wanted to stay in bed. It was encouraging to read about how she relied on her love for her dog to help her get through this. She also was able to get healing from past wounds. I immensely liked reading about her whole family story and she how she covered each family member. 

 

 

"I received this book free from the publisher, K-Love Books for my honest review.”

 

 

 

If you would like to purchase a copy, check it out on Amazon.com:

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Behind-Lights-Extraordinary-Adventure-Family/dp/1954201249