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
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
This first novel, ostensibly about the friendship between two boys, Reuven and Danny, from the time when they are fourteen on opposing yeshiva ball clubs, is actually a gently didactic differentiation between two aspects of the Jewish faith, the Hasidic and the Orthodox. Primarily the Hasidic, the little known mystics with their beards, earlocks and stringently reclusive way of life. According to Reuven's father who is a Zionist, an activist, they are fanatics; according to Danny's, other Jews are apostates and Zionists "goyim." The schisms here are reflected through discussions, between fathers and sons, and through the separation imposed on the two boys for two years which still does not affect their lasting friendship or enduring hopes: Danny goes on to become a psychiatrist refusing his inherited position of "tzaddik"; Reuven a rabbi.... The explanation, in fact exegesis, of Jewish culture and learning, of the special dedication of the Hasidic with its emphasis on mind and soul, is done in sufficiently facile form to engage one's interest and sentiment. The publishers however see a much wider audience for The Chosen. If they "rub their tzitzis for good luck,"—perhaps—although we doubt it.
Pub Date: April 28, 1967
ISBN: 0449911543
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
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