KIRKUS REVIEW
A spiritual remembrance that focuses on a woman’s claims of prophecy.
When debut author Hutchinson was a child, she says, she started to experience dreams and visions sent by God that accurately predicted the future, which frightened her mother. Once, she dreamed of a destructive tornado, and weeks later, one devastated her home. Later, God healed her asthma, she says, but it was only years afterward that she felt prepared to fully surrender her life to him. She suffered through some difficult years, including two failed marriages and multiple abortions, but she says that she continued to experience epiphanic communications from God, who spoke to her in dreams. Other times, she says, God simply spoke out loud to her. She writes that one day, she found key passages in the Bible that were highlighted, apparently by God, to provide her with instruction. Another time, she found a message written in her handwriting but was unable to recall ever scribbling it. God warned her of other people, she says, by providing her with specific images; one former friend who betrayed her, for example, appeared to Hutchinson in a dream to have the face of a monkey. Eventually, she says, God told her to write this book and even gave her the title; she then felt that she had been called upon to assume the role of prophet and evangelize God’s word. The crux of Hutchinson’s message seems to be that an intimate relationship with God is available to anyone who opens his or her heart sufficiently and that his love isn’t reserved for some elite, chosen few. It’s hard not to be affected by the earnestness of the author’s mission or the egalitarianism of her message. However, only readers who are already very sympathetic to the notion of direct communication with God will find her story compelling. Others will likely be more incredulous. At one point, for example, the book warns that catastrophe will strike the United States as penance for its growing decadence: “The huge ship (Titanic) is America heading down the wrong path and if it does not change direction, America is going to run into that iceberg and America will sink.” Hutchinson’s eschatological alarmism, and her diagnosis of America’s moral decline, will turn off many readers.
Despite this book’s sincere charm, even devotedly religious readers may find it too preoccupied with supernatural events.
