JOSHUA AND THE CHILDREN

The second in a series of saccharine inspirational fables about a humble wanderer named Joshua who turns out to be Jesus. In his first appearance (Joshua, 1987), Joshua was a simple woodcarver who sucessfully challenged the might of the Catholic Church. This time out, he arrives in a village that for years has been decimated by sectarian warfare--the Catholics fighting the Protestants. The day before his arrival, one child has been killed, and another severely wounded, in a grenade attack. Trying to stop the fighting, Joshua ignores the grown-ups and focuses on the children--with great success: they stop picking their sports teams with a Catholic/ Protestant bias, and even begin to show the adults the error of their ways. But Joshua has powerful enemies--including the hate-mongering cleric Rev. John V. Maislin and a bloodthirsty group of fanatical terrorists. A sniper is sent out to kill Joshua as he speaks to a gathering of children; he is mortally wounded, but nonetheless manages to heal the wounds of a little girl who's been shot in the head (she is, in fact, the sniper's own daughter) before expiring himself. And the next day, when mourners file past his coffin, they discover it to be empty. . . Heavy-handed and tediously sincere. Another religious polemic for Girzone's already sizable audience.