A clean, readable Christian mystery with an unsurprising outcome.
Stewart’s novel is a classic murder mystery with a Christian bent set in an upstate New York town that is no stranger to corruption.
Heroine Kate Feeney finds herself at the center of that corruption when she stands up to the school board to protest a proposed sex education program and gets thrown in jail. It’s only the beginning of Kate’s adventures. After the president of the school board is murdered, Kate begins working with police Detective Mike Roberts, formerly of the NYPD, to track down the killer. Suspects include a wealthy sheik from the fictional country of South Arabyia, police officers who have a blackmailing operation and a local family of moonshiners. Before she can do much, though, Kate is unfairly arrested again, this time after an altercation at an abortion clinic protest. While being transported in the back of a police cruiser after her arraignment, Kate manages to avoid being raped by a corrupt cop. She flees to the woods when she hears shots fired, only to come out and find the cop dead. Although she saw nothing, she heard the killer’s voice, and this makes her a target for the unknown murderer who tries more than once to bring down the gutsy woman. A number of twists and turns produce an action-packed story, and thanks to the relationship between Kate and Mike, there’s a hint of romance. Though Kate and Mike are baffled, regular mystery readers will likely deduce the killer’s ID thanks to a few subtle hints. The story is marred by clunky dialogue that is asked to carry too much of the back story, such as this comment made by Mike: “Because my mother’s suicide was caused by mental instability, your childhood abuse makes me afraid you might become mentally unstable. I’m worried that your risk-taking is a suicidal impulse.” Nonbelievers may wonder if Kate’s prayers are falling on deaf ears when they see she must fight off a rapist, gets kidnapped by a sheik and both her aunt and her dog get shot, but Christians will likely admire her steadfast faith.
A clean, readable Christian mystery with an unsurprising outcome.Pub Date: June 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477429365
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A charming and incisive debut.
Four young nuns wind up running a halfway house full of quirky characters in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Four Catholic sisters live with the elderly Sister Roberta in upstate New York. All on the edge of turning 30, the young women are at loose ends: Their day care is shuttered, and Sister Roberta is retiring. However, the four women refuse to be parted: “We were fixed to one another, like parts of some strange, asymmetrical body: Frances was the mouth; Mary Lucille, the heart; Therese, the legs. And I, Agatha, the eyes.” Eventually, the Buffalo diocese decides to transfer them to Rhode Island, where they are put in charge of running Little Neon, a “Mountain Dew”–colored house for residents trying to get sober and get back on their feet. When the local Catholic high school needs someone to teach geometry, the sisters volunteer Agatha, who is labelled as the quietest but the smartest of the quartet. As Agatha immerses herself in her new life, she finds the residents of Little Neon, from parolee Baby to Tim Gary, whose disfigured jaw prevents him from finding love, open her eyes to new realities, as do her colleagues and students at the high school. Eventually, Agatha can no longer ignore that the church, and most of all she herself, is changing. Luchette’s novel, her first, is structured in small chapters that feel like vignettes from a slightly wacky indie film. The book is frequently vibrant with resonant images: Agatha learning to roller skate in Little Neon’s driveway or a resident drunk in a sequined dress riding a lawnmower through the snow. But even though the book feels light, Luchette does not turn away from the responsibility of examining the darkness undergirding the institution of the Catholic Church.
A charming and incisive debut.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-26526-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
A captivating Jewish twist on the classic American campus novel.
In Hopen’s ambitious debut, an Orthodox Jewish high school student finds his world transformed when his family moves to South Florida.
When protagonist Ari Eden leaves his bland life in Brooklyn—where he never felt deeply rooted—for a glitzy, competitive Modern Orthodox day school in the Miami suburbs, both readers and Ari himself are primed to expect a fish-out-of-water narrative. And indeed, Ari finds that his new classmates, though also traditionally observant by many standards, enjoy a lifestyle that is far more permissive than his own (a shade of Orthodoxy that is known as “yeshiva”). Suddenly Ari’s modest, pious world is replaced with a Technicolor whirlwind that includes rowdy parties, casual sex, drinking, drugs, and far more liberal interpretations of Jewish law than he has ever known. With its representation of multiple kinds of traditional Judaism, Hopen’s novel is a refreshing corrective to the popular tendency to erase the nuanced variations that exist under the umbrella of “Orthodoxy.” It also stands out for its stereotype-defying portrayal of Ari and his friends as teenagers with typical teenage concerns. But this is not just a novel about reorienting oneself socially or even religiously; though Ari’s level of observance certainly shifts, this is also not a simple “off the derech” (Jewish secularization) narrative. Ari’s new friend group, particularly its charismatic, enigmatic leader, Evan—a sort of foil for Ari—pushes him to consider new philosophical and existential norms as well as social, academic, and religious ones. The result is an entirely surprising tale, rich with literary allusions and Talmudic connections, about the powerful allure of belonging. This novel will likely elicit comparisons to the work of Chaim Potok: Like Potok’s protagonists, Ari is a religious Jew with a deep passion for literature, Jewish texts, and intellectual inquiry, and as in Potok’s fiction, his horizons are broadened when he encounters other forms of Orthodoxy. But Hopen’s debut may actually have more in common with campus novels like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Tobias Wolff’s Old School; its narrator’s involvement in an intense intellectual community leads him down an unexpected path that profoundly alters his worldview. The novel suffers due to its lamentably one-dimensional, archetypal female characters: the tortured-artist love interest, the ditsy blond, the girl next door. Hopen’s prose, and the scale of his project, occasionally feels overindulgent, but in that sense, form and content converge: This stylistic expansiveness is actually perfectly in tune with the world of the novel. Overall, Hopen’s debut signals a promising new literary talent; in vivid prose, the novel thoughtfully explores cultural particularity while telling a story with universal resonances.
A captivating Jewish twist on the classic American campus novel.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297474-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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