![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Francine Rivers
Nov. 15th, 2011 03:42 pmLast post I raved for a while about books about Evangelical Christian culture. Those books are excellent and I love them, but they're really just a road map. If you want to get down and dirty with Evangelical books, then you have to read Francine Rivers' A Voice in the Wind and An Echo in the Darkness.
Or, okay, you don't, but I'm going to tell you all about them because I just have to SHARE. They're shlocky, they're historically risible - Rivers never misses a chance to throw in evangelical buzzwords, never mind how un-Roman blathering about alternative lifestyles sounds - they're very Moral Majority; but they're nonetheless strangely page-turning.
( You guys, you guys, I have so much to tell you. )
So, yes. Basically these books are irredeemable potboilers with banal prose and warped values. But still…but still…despite all their problems, the unlikely plot contrivances and the hammering of a message I find highly disagreeable, still, there's something here.
The characters may be exasperating, they may be twisted to suit the messages, but I care about them. I want Julia to find an author who doesn't want to make an example of her and Hadassah to realize that Alexander is by far superior to Marcus. They breathe.
Or, okay, you don't, but I'm going to tell you all about them because I just have to SHARE. They're shlocky, they're historically risible - Rivers never misses a chance to throw in evangelical buzzwords, never mind how un-Roman blathering about alternative lifestyles sounds - they're very Moral Majority; but they're nonetheless strangely page-turning.
( You guys, you guys, I have so much to tell you. )
So, yes. Basically these books are irredeemable potboilers with banal prose and warped values. But still…but still…despite all their problems, the unlikely plot contrivances and the hammering of a message I find highly disagreeable, still, there's something here.
The characters may be exasperating, they may be twisted to suit the messages, but I care about them. I want Julia to find an author who doesn't want to make an example of her and Hadassah to realize that Alexander is by far superior to Marcus. They breathe.
