Review: An Open Heart by Harry Kraus

Moving from comfortable Virginia to Kenya to begin the nation’s first heart surgery programme sounds like a noble objective, but Dr Jace Rawlings is running away. He’s running away from a broken marriage, a possible affair and memory loss, and returning to the town where he grew up as a missionary kid, working at the hospital where his Dad was a doctor, and where he lost his faith and his twin sister.

But this is Africa, and there are challenges in getting the programme started, not least in getting the equipment through customs. And once Jace undertakes the first operation, he finds a strange after-effect: his patient is giving him messages from beyond this dimension. And that’s not his only problem. Someone is out to end the heart surgery programme, and it looks as though he might be implicated in a death back in the US.

I’ve read and enjoyed novels set in Africa and other exotic locations (particularly those by J M Windle). I’ve read and enjoyed medical dramas (by authors such as Candace Calvert and Hannah Alexander). I’ve read and enjoyed novels with a supernatural element (like The Widow of Saunders Creek or Illusion). And I’ve read and enjoyed several of Kraus’s previous books (including the Claire McCall series), so I thought I would enjoy this. I did, but not as much as I expected.

The opening of An Open Heart was excellent, as Jace found himself thrown in jail, then refusing to pay the bribes to release his medical equipment. But as I progressed, it felt as though the novel was trying to be a supernatural thriller (with supernatural messages and a witch doctor), a medical thriller (the surgery) and a suspense novel (who wants to end the heart programme and why, the US element and the back story about Jace’s twin sister) all at the same time. It was too much, and I’m not sure it worked.

But my big problem was Jace’s faith. While I could understand why he turned away from Christianity as a child, I didn’t see why he essentially faked faith throughout his adult life. He married another missionary kid, a strong Christian woman; he went to church, then he goes back to Africa to serve in a missionary hospital, yet he has no personal faith. (SPOILER: He then has a major change of heart at the end of the story, yet it came out of nowhere. It seemed convenient rather than heartfelt).

And there were times when An Open Heart was let down by the writing. I found that the technical dialogue that comes across quickly in a TV medical drama doesn’t work so well on the page. It sounded authentic, but it read like a foreign language. There were too many points of view, odd changes of tense, and some of the scenes had a repetitious sentence structure (like starting consecutive paragraphs with adverbs). And there’s a spelling mistake in the Amazon blurb (it’s maelstrom, not maeltsrom), which isn’t good.

Overall, An Open Heart could have been great, but it wasn’t.

Thanks to David C Cook and NetGalley for providing a free ebook for review. You can find out more about Harry Kraus at his website.

Review: Godspeed by Britt Merrick

Godspeed: Making Christ's Mission Your Own is specifically directed at American Christians, but the principles apply in other Western countries. It would be easy for me, sitting here in New Zealand, to say that because this book is specifically focussed on American Christians, it is not talking about me, my friends or my church. But it is. While the American church might display more of the faults Merrick speaks of, that is merely a function of size. Those same faults exist in New Zealand and in England (where I lived for ten years), and no doubt in other countries too.

Merrick speaks about “Incarnational Christianity”, which means that “we’re called out of the world in worship to God while being sent into the world as witnesses of God”. This struck me as an interesting point, and one that many Christians miss. I know many Christians who homeschool their children to prevent them being influenced by worldly things, yet Merrick would say they were missing half the message.

As with many of the best Christian non-fiction books, the author is giving their personal testimony, sharing what has impacted and changed their life. It is 'I found' rather than the lecturing 'you should' tone that some authors take. Godspeed is much more readable and teachable because of that underlying spirit of humility.

But the message of Godspeedruns the risk of being obscured by the vocabulary, especially in the opening chapters. Most authors tend to follow the rule of never using a complex word where a simple one will do. Merrick (or perhaps his collaborator) seems to take the opposite approach. I thought I had a good vocabulary, but I have never heard of terms like missiologically, ecclesiocentric, cosmocentric and anthropocentric (I find that am not alone. My 2010 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, which defines over 350,000 words, has only heard of two of these words, implying that the other two are either very new, or the author made them up).

Fortunately, these terms were explained, even though some others were not. Perhaps a Bible college graduate can explain the concept of the Biblical metanarrative. I can't. Nor can my dictionary. Godspeedbecomes much more readable after the first chapter, after the author abandons the theological terms and starts using more everyday language. Well worth reading, if you can get past the opening chapters.

Thanks to David C Cook and NetGalley for providing a free ebook for review.

Review: The Shard Fence by Keith Marsden

A shard fence is made of smashed glass bottles, jars and containers, with “the biggest, sharpest, deadliest pieces pressed into the wet concrete at the top of the wall, so that when it dried, a glass shard fence capped the wall and kept out all intruders”.  It is a sign of affluence in a country where so many people are desperately poor.

Brandon travels from affluent Oregon to a poor Brazillian favela to teach music at the Igreja da Esperança, the Church of Hope, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil – a city I have never heard of, yet with a population of 3 million people, almost much as New Zealand.  He quickly finds that it is going to be more challenging than he had anticipated.  A young man is killed as he arrives, and Brandon must decide whether he will stand with the people of the mission or 'be one who runs away'.  He is challenged to stay by Aline Reis, whose beauty has probably inspired Brandon to visit Brazil more than any divine calling.

Aline is a woman of strong faith in the face of the huge obstacles facing the church and congregation.  She must draw on her Christian faith to meet the needs of hurting people, and to stand firm in the face of evil.  Brandon, who is in Brazil for reasons of his own, must decide where he stands, too.  He quickly comes to learn that being ‘fortunate’ is not all about money, but is about things more eternal.  The Shard Fence had a clear Christian message, and a strong challenge around conquering our fear and living for God in what might seem to be impossible circumstances.  In that The Shard Fence, was excellent.

On the down side, the book had some elementary editing errors (misspelled words, misplaced punctuation, plot inconsistencies).  I also felt that there was not enough emphasis on the developing relationship between Aline and Brandon, although that could have been because I am a female reader who likes the romance side of the plot, rather than a male reader who might well find that the romance distracted from the ‘main’ plot!  I have heard it said that female readers prefer more ‘show’ than ‘tell’ in their fiction, whereas men feel the opposite.  From that point of view, this was definitely a novel targeted more towards the male reader.  It was an excellent story, but the romantic in me would have liked more development in that area.

Thanks to Keith Marsden and Club Lighthouse Publishing for providing a free ebook for review.