This book tops the list of the worst books I've read in the last 10 years. Granted, I'm not at all the target audience --- but there's So. Much. More. Read on...
I used to devour Christian fiction books --- two or three to a weekend, two or three during the week. The past six or seven years, though, I've really struggled as they've seemed more and more shallow and juvenile. This book is the second of five that I've chosen to read through over the next couple weeks in an attempt to see if Christian fiction has improved since I decided to give up on it. It 100% goes above and beyond all the reasons I stopped reading the genre. When I'm through with this mind-numbing experiment, I'll report the results on my YouTube channel, Belle's Library.
One of the questions I'm asking myself during this project is, what makes a book considered to be Christian or inspirational fiction in this generation? Is it put on that shelf in the bookshop because of its lack of content or its inclusion of content? Is it just clean or is it specifically Christian? In the case of this story, I think it's just put there because it's somewhat "clean" and the author has been writing for this genre for a long time. There's nothing at all specifically Biblical about this story except a few little one or two sentence hints that finding God made Theo's brother nice now. Do we ever see this transformation? We only have the brother's biased word to go on⦠but still it's definitely not an evangelical story. The only time faith is discussed at any depth is with the wife who repeatedly blames herself for bringing her husband to Christ. If he wouldn't have become a Christian, he wouldn't be putting his life at risk in order to right previous wrongs and live with integrity. WHAT??!!! This seems to be a case of Jesus-lite, making sure we don't offend a reader and come across as too churchy for the lukewarm.
Yet, "clean" is relative and it was disappointing to see yet another "Christian" male author show his grossness and lack of integrity by both separating out the pretty girls from the "square-faced and large ones", as well as by being overly-0bsessed with the color of everyone's skin. âHer skin was the shade of sourwood honeyâ. What the heck is that? Not only is that a stupid description, this gives me no mental picture, buddy. When I look up sourwood honey, I see translucent orange --- that's kind of creepy for a skin tone. The sexy sleuthy sidekick gets to have âslightly parted lipsâ and a âsmoky gazeâ. (She doesn't just look at stuff, she gazes. She's gazed three times in two pages.) This is surely due to the fact that she's got not an âounce of spare flesh on her lovely frameâ. I wonder why the girl-that's-a-friend back in chapter two or Gloria of chapter 22 don't get all these fascinating descriptive words. Oh yeah, because they're at least 10 years older than the guyâ¦
Nothing in this book feels fleshed out.. it's almost like someone said, âQuick! We need a pandemic story that promotes vaccines and âtruth from leadershipâ before March 2020!â Check out this fun bit of dialogue:
âThe one part of the process over which Kenneth has no control is human trials,â Avery went on. âThe process is incredibly complex. And expensive. Bringing a new drug to market costs on average over a quarter of a billion dollars. More than half of this cost comes in the human-trial phase.â
âIt's stupid,â Claudia said, âthe bureaucratic nightmare they have to endure when introducing a new drug to the FDA.â
Avery said, âBut there's a group of us working in immunology who think a significant outbreak will change all that. One that's soon to come.â
âMakes sense,â Della agreed. âIf millions of people are threatened, the population won't allow the bureaucrats to slow things down.â
âBishop Industries was secretly preparing for this event,â Avery said.
If I would have read this as a new release in 2019, I would have no idea what any of that meant. Now it explains so much. Wonder how this author feels now that the rushed Covid vaccine has caused so much devastation? Conclusion: either this is a story that just definitely has not aged well⦠or it was a story on purpose.
In addition to a just plain stupid story, the writing and editing are horrendous. Within the first 30 seconds I was rolling my eyes at the sentence(s) being started with the word, "which". Just to make sure I wasn't being old fashioned, I looked it up. The modern online grammar manual says it's not proper but is sometimes used stylistically for effect. The word was used to begin a sentence four times in the first chapter. I counted 16 times throughout the book. Who knows how many times it actually happened? That's not stylistic, that's sloppy. The book is comprised of about 9,000 choppy boring sentences and ridiculous phrases such as, âif nowhere had a naval, this would be itâ; and â_____ shivered at the warm-cold taste of her lips.â Warm and cold are opposites and neither have a taste. Plus, ew.
But most of all, this author needs to know that âspider senseâ is not a thing unless you are Spiderman. No one in this book is exhibiting Spiderman-like qualities. It's definitely not a thing to be mentioned SIX times in a novel. Are we sure this isn't actually Dan Brown masquerading as a hormonal teenager?
This story gets half a star because I think the chapter page illustrations are cool. They start out with tiny germs on the page and as each chapter goes on, more and more germs are spreading across the page. Too bad the creative page designer guy didn't get to write this story.
I used to devour Christian fiction books --- two or three to a weekend, two or three during the week. The past six or seven years, though, I've really struggled as they've seemed more and more shallow and juvenile. This book is the second of five that I've chosen to read through over the next couple weeks in an attempt to see if Christian fiction has improved since I decided to give up on it. It 100% goes above and beyond all the reasons I stopped reading the genre. When I'm through with this mind-numbing experiment, I'll report the results on my YouTube channel, Belle's Library.
One of the questions I'm asking myself during this project is, what makes a book considered to be Christian or inspirational fiction in this generation? Is it put on that shelf in the bookshop because of its lack of content or its inclusion of content? Is it just clean or is it specifically Christian? In the case of this story, I think it's just put there because it's somewhat "clean" and the author has been writing for this genre for a long time. There's nothing at all specifically Biblical about this story except a few little one or two sentence hints that finding God made Theo's brother nice now. Do we ever see this transformation? We only have the brother's biased word to go on⦠but still it's definitely not an evangelical story. The only time faith is discussed at any depth is with the wife who repeatedly blames herself for bringing her husband to Christ. If he wouldn't have become a Christian, he wouldn't be putting his life at risk in order to right previous wrongs and live with integrity. WHAT??!!! This seems to be a case of Jesus-lite, making sure we don't offend a reader and come across as too churchy for the lukewarm.
Yet, "clean" is relative and it was disappointing to see yet another "Christian" male author show his grossness and lack of integrity by both separating out the pretty girls from the "square-faced and large ones", as well as by being overly-0bsessed with the color of everyone's skin. âHer skin was the shade of sourwood honeyâ. What the heck is that? Not only is that a stupid description, this gives me no mental picture, buddy. When I look up sourwood honey, I see translucent orange --- that's kind of creepy for a skin tone. The sexy sleuthy sidekick gets to have âslightly parted lipsâ and a âsmoky gazeâ. (She doesn't just look at stuff, she gazes. She's gazed three times in two pages.) This is surely due to the fact that she's got not an âounce of spare flesh on her lovely frameâ. I wonder why the girl-that's-a-friend back in chapter two or Gloria of chapter 22 don't get all these fascinating descriptive words. Oh yeah, because they're at least 10 years older than the guyâ¦
Nothing in this book feels fleshed out.. it's almost like someone said, âQuick! We need a pandemic story that promotes vaccines and âtruth from leadershipâ before March 2020!â Check out this fun bit of dialogue:
âThe one part of the process over which Kenneth has no control is human trials,â Avery went on. âThe process is incredibly complex. And expensive. Bringing a new drug to market costs on average over a quarter of a billion dollars. More than half of this cost comes in the human-trial phase.â
âIt's stupid,â Claudia said, âthe bureaucratic nightmare they have to endure when introducing a new drug to the FDA.â
Avery said, âBut there's a group of us working in immunology who think a significant outbreak will change all that. One that's soon to come.â
âMakes sense,â Della agreed. âIf millions of people are threatened, the population won't allow the bureaucrats to slow things down.â
âBishop Industries was secretly preparing for this event,â Avery said.
If I would have read this as a new release in 2019, I would have no idea what any of that meant. Now it explains so much. Wonder how this author feels now that the rushed Covid vaccine has caused so much devastation? Conclusion: either this is a story that just definitely has not aged well⦠or it was a story on purpose.
In addition to a just plain stupid story, the writing and editing are horrendous. Within the first 30 seconds I was rolling my eyes at the sentence(s) being started with the word, "which". Just to make sure I wasn't being old fashioned, I looked it up. The modern online grammar manual says it's not proper but is sometimes used stylistically for effect. The word was used to begin a sentence four times in the first chapter. I counted 16 times throughout the book. Who knows how many times it actually happened? That's not stylistic, that's sloppy. The book is comprised of about 9,000 choppy boring sentences and ridiculous phrases such as, âif nowhere had a naval, this would be itâ; and â_____ shivered at the warm-cold taste of her lips.â Warm and cold are opposites and neither have a taste. Plus, ew.
But most of all, this author needs to know that âspider senseâ is not a thing unless you are Spiderman. No one in this book is exhibiting Spiderman-like qualities. It's definitely not a thing to be mentioned SIX times in a novel. Are we sure this isn't actually Dan Brown masquerading as a hormonal teenager?
This story gets half a star because I think the chapter page illustrations are cool. They start out with tiny germs on the page and as each chapter goes on, more and more germs are spreading across the page. Too bad the creative page designer guy didn't get to write this story.
