A warm, sometimes-silly Christmas story.
An angel’s adventures serve to illustrate the spirit of Christmas.
Debut author Cuccia’s trilogy follows the life of Shiny, an angel. The book’s opening story, “A Christmas Tale,” borrows heavily from It’s a Wonderful Life, and is the strongest of the collection. As in Frank Capra’s film, an angel is dispatched to Earth on Christmas Eve to bring goodwill to men in order to win his wings. That angel is Shiny, a character named for his bald head who is often mocked by his fellow angels for his lack of both hair and wings. But after delivering a message from God to a blind man, a child in a hospital, and an old man in the midst of a crisis of faith, Shiny rises from the laughingstock of heaven to an archangel respected by his peers. The second story, “A Christmas Lullaby,” ventures into more theological territory. Jesus sends Shiny from the Garden of Eden to “eternity past” in order to facilitate Jesus’ own birth at the Annunciation. The section successfully draws the reader’s attention to the holiday’s religious history, but it’s overloaded with scriptural trivia. We learn, for example, that the seraphim guarding the gates of Eden have six wings instead of two. The work rebounds in the third section, “A Christmas Miracle,” where Shiny and his new friends inspire a religious revival. The excessive scriptural digressions and cringe-worthy puns—“These aren’t just any sunglasses, these are S-o-n-glasses”—might drive some readers back to the classics, but Christian families looking for something new will find a heartwarming book for the holidays.
A warm, sometimes-silly Christmas story.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5246-4392-8
Page Count: 210
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2017
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
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
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