An unpretentious, if rather low-key, story about a pastor looking for the hand of God.
A married pastor confronts long-dormant romantic feelings in Epps’ debut Christian novel.
Fifty-five-year-old Robert Maxwell, the pastor at Believer’s Community Fellowship Church in Graceville, Alabama, feels tempted every Sunday as he looks out and sees Emma Crane sitting in one of the pews. “What is wrong with you?” he chastises himself after one service. “You have the most amazing wife on the planet, and you love her with all your heart, so why does this continue to happen to you?” Forty years ago, Robert and Emma were middle school sweethearts; sometime after she moved away, he became a devout Christian, married a woman named Amelia, and had children. But ever since Emma moved back to town two years ago, Robert has felt old feelings stirring—and he’s asked God for help in dealing with them. Robert already has enough on his plate between his duties as pastor and his day job at a business-operations consulting firm, not to mention the troubles of his daughters and their husbands—one of whom he likes, and one he doesn’t. As he goes through his daily life, the various challenges he faces test his faith in ways great and small. Emma is perhaps his greatest test of all—but how should a true man of God face it? Epps writes in an easygoing prose style that effectively channels the rhythms of his protagonist’s daily life: “Robert was looking forward to his week off….Saturday at his in-laws was very peaceful. Amelia brought the ingredients to cook two-pound cakes.” It isn’t a very gripping yarn—Robert is hardly Job in terms of the trials that God sets before him—and it wraps up in a way that one might expect in a Christian novel about a devout man. Even so, Epps presents a realistic tale that’s firmly religious without being overwhelmingly dogmatic. Christian readers looking for a low-stakes slice-of-life story about family and community will likely enjoy this short volume.
An unpretentious, if rather low-key, story about a pastor looking for the hand of God.Pub Date: May 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-973661-96-2
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.
Christian-fiction writer Martin (The Dead Don’t Dance, not reviewed) chronicles the personal tragedy of a Georgia heart surgeon.
Five years ago in Atlanta, Reese could not save his beloved wife Emma from heart failure, even though the Harvard-trained surgeon became a physician so that he could find a way to fix his childhood sweetheart’s congenitally faulty ticker. He renounced practicing medicine after her death and now lives in quiet anonymity as a boat mechanic on Lake Burton. Across the lake is Emma’s brother Charlie, who was rendered blind on the same desperate night that Reese fought to revive his wife on their kitchen floor. When Reese helps save the life of a seven-year-old local girl named Annie, who turns out to have irreparable heart damage, he is compassionately drawn into her case. He also grows close to Annie’s attractive Aunt Cindy and gradually comes to recognize that the family needs his expertise as a transplant surgeon. Martin displays some impressive knowledge about medical practice and the workings of the heart, but his Christian message is not exactly subtle. “If anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart,” Reese notes of his medical studies. Emma’s letters (kept in a bank vault) quote Bible verse; Charlie elucidates stories of Jesus’ miracles for young Annie; even the napkins at the local bar, The Well, carry passages from the Gospel of John for the benefit of the biker clientele. Moreover, Martin relentlessly hammers home his sentimentality with nature-specific metaphors involving mating cardinals and crying crickets. (Annie sells crickets as well as lemonade to raise money for her heart surgery.) Reese’s habitual muttering of worldly slogans from Milton and Shakespeare (“I am ashes where once I was fire”) doesn’t much cut the cloying piety, and an over-the-top surgical save leaves the reader feeling positively bruised.
Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 1-5955-4054-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: WestBow/Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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