A briskly paced but sanctimonious and problematic adventure.
After apocalyptic floods, seven young adults find themselves drawn to a mountain paradise in Minster’s post-apocalyptic Christian novel.
Eight-year-old Gabriel Thomas prays to Santa Claus as he watches the world flood from inside his Pennsylvania school with other children with nowhere else to go. Suddenly, he’s filled with the Holy Spirit as God chooses him to lead an “Elect” few to paradise. Gabriel leads 11 other children, on God’s instructions, to establish a community on a nearby mountain while the world floods. Twenty years and a second flood later, the remains of humanity are mostly divided into the Elect on Spring Mountain and the cannibalistic Golgoths who terrorize survivors outside it. Seven young adults in the South all have the same dream, featuring Gabriel. In Alabama, Booker Bailey, a scholar, recently lost his parents to the Golgoths. Marshall Langar just discovered that his common-law wife aborted her pregnancy and wants him to leave their Tennessee cabin. In Georgia, Arabella Pendleman and Tatum Winters are convinced by the devout Christian Aliyah Freedman and Dodie Sealy to leave for Spring Mountain, and in Tennessee, Jayden Bonner, a musician and astrologer, does the same. The seven meet on the Appalachian Trail, evading Golgoths called north by their leader, Hostis Dei, in preparation for a final battle. Minster’s novel tells a religious tale of apocalypse in the style of the Left Behind series, and the plot is well paced and suspenseful. But it’s also an extremely violent narrative in which the threat of rape by the Golgoths is used constantly to heighten female characters’ distress. Throughout the novel, women immediately defer to men to make decisions. The atheistic Tatum, who “claimed to like girls more than boys,” meets the devout Marshall and is said to be “sanctified through her believing husband”: “Now she is a believer…and that beautiful bright light is pushing out all the old darkness,” says Jayden. While the book has many other short sermons throughout it, seemingly intended for non-Christians, the novel is likely to appeal only to those who already share the characters’ beliefs.
A briskly paced but sanctimonious and problematic adventure.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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
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