Incidentally

Taggart's project is disarmingly simple and works because she trusts it: take the Bible's second-string cast — Judah, Miriam, Hannah, Saul, even Judas — and let each one narrate their own mess, ending every chapter with the same quiet turn, "Incidentally, He won't give up on you either." That refrain, tied straight to the title, does real structural work — it's the theological spine of the whole book, and by the third or fourth chapter the reader starts anticipating it the way you'd anticipate a chorus.

What lands hardest is her willingness to sit inside genuinely uncomfortable theology rather than smoothing it over. Judah doesn't get a tidy redemption — he's still asking, decades later, "Is that what God is like?" about his sons' deaths, and admits Tamar "was surely more righteous than I." Saul's chapter ends not with despair but with an unresolved question flung at the reader: "Incidentally, I wonder what you think about this?" That's a braver choice than a pat moral, and it's consistent with her stated aim in the introduction — to let scripture's silences be filled with real, conflicted interiority rather than sermon-safe answers.

Hannah's arc — the humiliation by Peninnah, Eli's cruel misreading of her grief ("How long are you going to stay drunk?"), the wrench of actually keeping her vow — gives the book its most emotionally specific stretch, and "I believed I was nothing; He believed I was precious in his sight" earns its place as a genuine thesis statement, not decoration. This is devotional writing doing exactly what it promises for readers who want scripture to feel lived-in rather than recited.