Turrill (A Bridge to Eden, not reviewed, etc.) can be rambling and slow to set the scene, but offers a taut and highly...
A preacher suffers adversities, has visions, gathers disciples, and sets out to fulfill God’s mission for him.
The Gudsens are old-school Michigan Lutherans: upright, honorable, and dull as dishwater. But lately they’ve been acting kind of strange. Herkimer Gudsen, the pastor of St. Luke’s Church in Saginaw, made headlines a while back when he was shot through the skull with a hunter’s arrow and miraculously lived to tell the tale. Surgeons had to leave part of the arrow shaft embedded in his head, but Herkimer suffered no ill effects whatever—or so it seemed. Now, though, he begins to hear God speaking to him, and the church elders aren’t entirely thrilled by his messages. They expel Herkimer from his church when he refuses to oust two openly gay parishioners who are living together, so he founds a church of his own with the pair of gay refugees as his first followers. His wife Megan, hopelessly ill with skin cancer, is wary of her husband’s visions but becomes a believer in short order when her cancer goes into remission and Herkimer is cured of his impotence. Even Herkimer’s jaded brother Jim, a world-weary Vietnam vet, gets in on the act, forsaking his agnosticism and pledging God his celibacy in exchange for Megan’s cure. When Herkimer declares that God has promised a cure for Megan in exchange for saving 12 lost souls, Jim and his brother take to the road. As they make their way to California, they gather in fallen women, junkies, hypocrites, and sinners of every age and condition. They also find a sister they’d never known about, and a father they’d given up for dead. Will Megan recover? Hard to say—but there’s no shortage of miracles on hand.
Turrill (A Bridge to Eden, not reviewed, etc.) can be rambling and slow to set the scene, but offers a taut and highly focused narrative once he gets going.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59264-090-7
Page Count: 444
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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