Plodding Christian fare limited to its target audience.
This first in a planned series from Warner’s Christian imprint features Claire Everett as she improves her life (with the help of God).
Bateman’s heroine is a bitter pill of a woman, though one suspects it was not the author’s intention to make her appear so. Claire has worked hard in the years since her divorce. She’s raising four children and writing Christian romance novels to great success. When her busy schedule comes to a halt as she recuperates from surgery for carpal tunnel, Claire uses this down time to work on herself—lose some weight, reconnect with her kids, go to church more often, find some flesh-and-bone friends, as opposed to those who live online. She achieves these goals by novel’s end, but her real accomplishment is forgiving her once unfaithful ex-husband Dr. Rick. Now married to the young, beautiful Darcy, Rick is the unmentionable in Claire’s life, and her barely repressed anger is affecting her children. Young Shawn has been writing lewd poems honoring the school secretary (though Claire blames the secretary’s prominent cleavage) and now the family is in counseling. Meanwhile, Shawn’s teacher Greg Lewis may just be the good man Claire has been praying for. Bateman uses all the touchstones of contemporary evangelical Christian pop-culture, serving to make Claire a caricature instead of a character. In fact, if one were to create a parody of a Thomas Kincaid–loving, Wal-Mart shopping, The Purpose-Driven Life–reading woman, Claire would be it. Sadly intolerant for a work of Christian literature (her Jewish counselor is “okay” because he’s converted, she applauds her son’s eventual acceptance of conformity because he looked like a “freak” with a fake lip ring), the novel’s worst sin is still its aching predictability.
Plodding Christian fare limited to its target audience.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-69608-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: FaithWords
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
