Action-adventure for a Christian evangelical audience.
With the fourth in The End series, LaHaye and Parshall (Brink of Chaos, 2012, etc.) continue to translate apocalyptic theology into action-adventure fiction.
The rapture has occurred. Christian believers have been taken to heaven. Now, Satan seeks to subdue the world, and his evil agent is the Global Alliance. The good folk left behind, now Christians, are resisting. That’s the theology piece, but the book reads like a spy novel set in the immediate future and using Revelations as a plot outline. Chapters are short, and settings jump around the globe as the narrative follows multiple characters. The protagonist is the head of the Remnant, Ethan March, subject to visions and recipient of miracles. The antagonist is Alexander Colliquin, head of the Alliance. Characters, however, are one-dimensional, although there’s a chaste love story between March and Rivka Reuban, former Mossad agent. There are odd dialogue juxtapositions—a believer is confronted by a murderous pimp in a Hong Kong back alley and threatened with death, only to respond "I’ve settled up my life with Christ. I know where I’m going. Do you?" The issues at hand are, first, the refusal of believers to submit to "BID-Tag" implants, laser-readable identity chips, and second, the Alliance’s effort to subvert the Internet to its own purposes—mind control—by taking over the United States’ vast security mainframe infrastructure, particularly a facility in Utah. Evil machinations in Washington thread through the story, including an assassination, but action zigzags around the world. With the action moving quickly, the narrative is constructed to suggest the apocalypse is near, and so there are references to current events. The writing is prosaic, and the theology is fundamentalist rather than mystical. As a character notes at book's end, the prophesied Tribulation is yet unfinished, and so LaHaye and Parshall have more to write.
Action-adventure for a Christian evangelical audience.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-310-33464-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Zondervan
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.
A Christian woman and a Jewish man fall in love in medieval France.
In 1088, a Christian girl of Norman descent falls in love with the son of a rabbi. They run away together, to disastrous effect: Her father sends knights after them, and though they flee to a small southern village where they spend a few happy years, their budding family is soon decimated by a violent wave of First Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. The girl, whose name becomes Hamoutal when she converts to Judaism, winds up roaming the world. Hertmans’ (War and Turpentine, 2016, etc.) latest novel is based on a true story: The Cairo Genizah, a trove of medieval manuscripts preserved in an Egyptian synagogue, contained an account of Hamoutal’s plight. Hamoutal makes up about half of Hertmans’ novel; the other half is consumed by Hertmans’ own interest in her story. Whenever he can, he follows her journey: from Rouen, where she grew up, to Monieux, where she and David Todros—her Jewish husband—made a brief life for themselves, and all the way to Cairo, and back. “Knowing her life story and its tragic end,” Hertmans writes, “I wish I could warn her of what lies ahead.” The book has a quiet intimacy to it, and in his descriptions of landscape and travel, Hertmans’ prose is frequently lovely. In Narbonne, where David’s family lived, Hertmans describes “the cool of the paving stones in the late morning, the sound of doves’ wings flapping in the immaculate air.” But despite the drama of Hamoutal’s story, there is a static quality to the book, particularly in the sections where Hertmans describes his own travels. It’s an odd contradiction: Hertmans himself moves quickly through the world, but his book doesn’t quite move quickly enough.
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4708-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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