2011-11-15

osprey_archer: (books)
2011-11-15 03:42 pm

Francine Rivers

Last 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.