Each week in this place two additional chapters will be published from the Young Adult speculative fiction novel The Dragon and the Dove. The chapters will alternate point of view between the protagonists, so readers will receive the next step in each character’s story.
Bookmark this page and return each week on Wednesdays: The Dragon and the Dove
Book Review: Hazardous Duty (Squeaky Clean Mysteries #1) by Christy Barritt
(Three Stars)
“Look, Nancy Drew. This isn’t your case.”
Great concept: agnostic crime scene investigator wantabee who dropped out of school because of family necessity starts crime scene cleanup firm. Unfortunately, both the writing and the plot fail to deliver. Needed another editing, especially of her philosophic musings. Good sense of place and time. Nice, relevant cover art.
“I didn’t want to be a know-it-all. I really didn’t. My best friend in college had been one, which drove me crazy, especially considering I knew more than she did.”
Gabby is an unsympathetic protagonist, perhaps not intentionally. She is stubborn and stupid. By rights she should have been dead several times.
“So far you’re the only sane one I’ve met.” “And I’m covered in ash, smell like smoke, and clean up after murders.” “My standards of sane are really low.”
The supporting cast is good, if they tend toward clichés. The action is questionable. For example, the story opens with Gabby pulling skull fragments from a wall. What CSI team would have left that behind? Not to mention oddly-placed droplets of blood.
“Who needed details when you had an imagination like mine?’
Quibbles: “Bottle-cap glasses”? Her heart throb of the moment flees to his fiancé’s home state? Gabby jumps to so many conclusions she should have been in the Olympics.
“Don’t leave the state or do anything stupid.” “Understood.” “Which part? The leaving or the stupid, because I don’t think you have a lot of control over the latter.”
The inevitable come-to-Jesus climax feels contrived. Whose plea for divine intervention as she’s being murdered meanders into theology and qualification? Not “Please Lord, help me. If you really are up there, like my friends say you are, I want to know you.”
Book Review: Ordained Irreverence (Elmo Jenkins #1) by McMillian Moody
(Three Stars)
“I felt like the refuse of the rich and famous. If this is what it was going to be like working full-time in a church, I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
An engaging funny, and at the same time sad opening to a series about a young man becoming a Baptist minister. (The denomination is only mentioned once or twice, but it’s obvious from internal evidence.) Moody captures many internal dynamics which are true of all bureaucratic organizations, especially those with undue power an influence vested in those who have their own Continue reading
Book Review: Stealthy Steps (Nanostealth #1) by Vicki Kestell
Three Stars
“You think you’re scared I’m the invisible freak!”
I liked it. Well-developed tale with a strong, if emotionally immature protagonist. Self-depreciating humor fits the character and story. Everything breaks her way, even the bad breaks. Too easy. Italics overused. “Giggles” too much.
“He’s a hardcore Christian. I couldn’t keep seeing [him] anymore.”
Christian literature, but protagonist realistically resists the initial gospel hard sell. Christian characters well drawn. Some antagonists border on caricatures.
“I was where you are twenty years ago. Different town, same drugs. Different corner, same grave just waiting for me to fall into it.”
Quibble: masked from one angle is not masked from all angles. The problems with real-time, adaptive omni-directional masking are enormous.
“Invisible is not a word that belongs in real life.”
Not so much concluded as finished the opening.
“Was life even worth the never ending struggle?”
theatrical release poster
Movie Review: God’s Not Dead 2 directed by Harold Cronk
Three Stars
I didn’t see this in the theaters partly because even Christians acknowledged that the first God’s Not Dead movie was shallow with poor production values. This time the production quality was good, the script was good, and the acting superb.
On the other hand, Rotten Tomatoes reviewed it as “Every bit the proselytizing lecture promised by its title, God’s Not Dead 2 preaches ham-fistedly to its paranoid conservative choir.” On the other hand, audiences loved it.
This was the final film role of Fred Thompson.
Non-Christians will not be inclined to watch this movie, but they’re missing a good experience on two counts. First, it’s a good story, well told. But send and most important, individual rights are under attack in our culture. Observe the condescending tone of the negative reviews.
Book Review: Ben-Hur; A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace
Five Stars
“A man is never so on trial as in the moment of excessive good fortune.”
Read the book. Many people argue about the relative merits of the 2015 movie version of Ben-Hur versus the classic 1959 version. I liked both, but realized I hadn’t read the underlying book, published in 1880. Now I have: forget the movies; read the book.
“When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.”
Moderns think, “That’s the story about the chariot race.” No. The chariot race occurs two-thirds of the way through, years before the ministry of Jesus. Both movies identify the source of a healing miracle as the blood of Jesus draining from the cross; the book ascribes a more obvious, but no less miraculous agent. Characters and subplots multiple, barely referred to in the movies.
“If thy faith is equal to thy knowledge, he will hear thee though all the heavens thunder.”
Like some modern novels, Ben-Hur weaves a new tale into the periphery of a well-known story, such as a Shakespeare play or Continue reading
Book Review: Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries by Melville Davisson Post
Three Stars
“Sometimes, a man’s voice can be all that separates darkness from light.”
Despite breaking every current political correctness standard, these stories (first published in 1914) are well-written. Women’s roles, slavery, sympathetic Christians. Abner is the sleuth, solving apparently insolvable crimes and defending innocence.
“Oftimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truth.”
Each story is a short, stand-alone murder mystery. Abner solves them with liberal applications of deductive reasoning but from a heavily scriptural viewpoint. Not sure about Post’s denominational affiliation, but Abner comes on strong for truth, justice and the American way. Along the way he quotes and applies the Bible truthfully.
“No one of them believed in what the other taught, but they all believed in justice.”
Not “the finest mysteries ever written“, but they’re good.
“The heart of a woman is the deepest of God’s riddles.”
Book Review: Hand of Adonai: The Book of Things to Come by Aaron Gansky
Three Stars
“Trust us. We know what we’re doing.” “Speak for yourself.”
Think: Breakfast Club does a Christian Dungeons and Dragons via Tron. It works better than it should. One of the brightest angles is the creators wondering why they fashioned the game as they did: making living through their creation difficult.
The D&D-role-playing game created by two of the high-school-age characters is as cheesy and illogical as you’d expect. That worked for me. “Writing demonstrated control and subtlety” didn’t. The set-up is good, and the cast right. The emotions seem authentic and well-considered. Even the sudden appearance of heroic skills is adequately explained.
“Hope, that feathered pest, perched in her heart again.”
The target audience are tweens. The cast is a study in stereotypes both before and after (If I tell you what that refers to …), but Continue reading
Book Review: The Miracle Man by Buck Storm
Four Stars
“Reality doesn’t always serve up what you want. But it always has a purpose.”
A well-conceived, well-developed tale of faith and perception set in the golden years shortly after World War Two. Storm creates a subtle sense of time and place throughout his story. A world without computers, cell phones, cable and internet suggests a slow pace which turns out to be as illusive for them as for us with all our labor-saving gadgets.
“Confusion put an arm around Luke’s shoulder.”
The characters are complex and real … mostly. We share the point of view of several characters will no doubt whose head we’re in and an adequate sense of certainty and confusion as appropriate. The varied cast avoids Continue reading
Book Review: Until Shiloh Comes: A Civil War Novel (1) by Karl A. Bacon
Five Stars
“A mother should never see her son like this.”
A Christian, historical fiction novel would seem an easy to overlook niche book. That would be a mistake. Until Shiloh Comes is about more than a poor southern family’s reaction to the devastation of a major Civil War battle on their doorstep. It’s about reality forcing its way into what we think is right and normal. Yes, five stars is a stretch, but there are so few really good books of this genre.
“How you talk isn’t important … what’s much better is the meaning of your words.”
Until Shiloh Comes is what fiction should be: engaging at a level deeper than facts. It’s what Christian fiction should be: real. It’s what historical fiction should be: accurate, yet accessible. Bacon succeeds telling a story true to the history, religion and sensibilities of 150 years ago yet still engaging to modern readers.
“It mightn’t seem right to us, but it’s what the good Lord’s given us, so that makes it right.”
The case in point is religion. Evangelical Christianity in 2016 has a different vocabulary and set of assumptions than Christians held in 1862. But to exactly reconstruct the particulars of the old-time faith would make it unintelligible to moderns. The author gently suggests differences in belief without raising contentious issues.
“But God had a different plan, and I don’t know what it is.”
Similarly, Bacon keeps the reader in the story historically with true-to-the-time details of race relations, farming, building and weapons technology. Experts may quibble, but for most readers its close enough.
“Famished food’s always better.”
Quibbles: Bacon overdoes the regional and racial dialects. Yes, rural Tennesseans would have spoken an argot unintelligible to modern ears, but having established his character’s types early Bacon could back off as the novel progresses. The neighbors’ reaction to a hated enemy might be less laissez-faire, but highlights the behavior of those whose reaction isn’t.
“A man ain’t what he is, but who he is.”
It ends with a cliffhanger, but unlike so many inept series the first volume is a cogent whole. The reader is drawn in to more, but not left feeling cheated by a three hundred page introduction.
“I’d rather not pass that way in the dark again.”
As a Matter of Fancy 