Review: Love Overcomes by Angela Schroeder

It's the last week of the year, so I'm burying the reviews of the books I didn't manage to finish in 2014 in the hope that you are all too busy recovering from Christmas to notice.

Amazon Book Description

Single mother Arabella Mackenzie never imagined that going to California with her sister Clara would have such a huge impact on her life. Since the end of a disastrous relationship, Arabella has been wary of wanting or needing anyone other than her family. But when she meets hunky actor, Jeremy Fowlis, she begins to have feelings for a man for the first time since her three year old son was born. Now, she needs to try to overcome her past and learn to trust again.

Jeremy is not used to women who don’t want to date him, or at least show him off to their friends – he is an in-demand actor, after all. He is tired of the shallow, avaricious attention that he gets from the public, but when he meets intelligent, cautious Arabella, she doesn’t even know his name. Arabella’s grounded beauty captivates him instantly, but, he is wary of getting involved with a single mother with a complicated past.

Can Arabella and Jeremy both overcome their doubts and fears in order to find love?

Meh.

I managed to make it a third of the way through Love Overcomes before I gave up. I simply wasn’t engaged in the plot or the characters, and I was finding the writing didn’t flow well, which made for awkward reading. This was mostly because of the excessive use of adverbs, creative dialogue tags (“Jake offered quickly”), floating body parts (her “eyes darted away”—did they come back?), redundant language (“she nodded consent”—when do we nod in dissent?) and a lack of contractions in dialogue. It didn’t help that the plot was a rehash of others I’d read and enjoyed more, such as Firstborn by Karen Kingsbury, and Freefall by Kristen Heitzmann.

It didn’t start well—it wasn’t explained why Arabella, Liam and Clara were going to LA (or why Arabella and Liam had to accompany Clara). The characters all seem to be holding back. It's one thing for a character to have secrets and hold them back from the other characters, but enough has to be revealed to the reader to get us to like the characters. It's not that the characters in Love Overcomes are unlikeable, more that I never felt I was given enough information to know enough to like them.

Overall, the unplot, uncharacters and awkward writing combined to ensure I had no emotional engagement in the story, and therefore no reason to finish it.

Thanks to Anaiah Press for providing a free ebook for review. You can find out more about Angela Schroeder at her website.

Review: The Innkeeper of Bethlehem by Scott Roloff

I hope you are all enjoying the Christmas season and your summer (or winter) holidays, and I hope you're spending time with family rather than online. For that reason, I've chosen this week to bury the reviews of the books I haven't enjoyed this year, but still feel morally obliged to review because I said I would. 

Annoying Mix of Stories

The Innkeeper of Bethlehem is described as “the true story of Santa Claus”, a story you will share with your family and create a new holiday tradition.

Uh, no.

First, Jesus is shown to be disobedient as a child. That contradicts the Bible, which makes clear Jesus was without sin. It mixes historical fact with supposition and plain fiction. For example, the book has the innkeeper’s wife helping Mary as she gave birth to Jesus—it’s possible, although we don’t even know from the biblical account if the innkeeper even had a wife. The innkeeper and his wife then go to Egypt with Jesus and his family (unlikely), and the families are lifelong friends, with the innkeeper teaching Jesus about wisdom (Jesus showed his Father’s wisdom from an early age. Why did He need to learn from an ex-innkeeper?).

The end of the story gets even more unbelievable. From the Amazon book description (which now summarises the whole story, although it didn’t when I agreed to read and review the book):

The book concludes with Shai and Adi following the Lord’s Star to the North Pole, where angels have built a palace. Jesus wants Shai and Adi to raise the baby angels there until they reach adulthood. The baby angels, or elves as the grown angels derogatively refer to them, are a mischievous lot. Shai becomes known as Santa Claus when a baby angel mispronounces “Shai, Uncle of Jesus,” claus being the angelic word for uncle.

Jesus also wants to give a present to each boy and girl on his birthday, Christmas Day, a tradition that he began during his life when he gave presents to his family. As part of their training, once a baby angel sprouts wings he or she is assigned to watch children and make toys for them. On Christmas Eve, Santa flies the sleigh to heaven to present the new adult angels to God, and then flies around the globe delivering Jesus’s presents to the children of the world.

As an adult, I think that’s ridiculous, but I could see it appealing to small children who don’t know anything of the truth of Jesus or Santa Claus. But I can't see why any Christian parent would want to teach this to their children.

And I don’t understand why the author has found a need to invent a background for Santa Claus when he’s based on a real historical figure who was known for his anonymous generosity. That’s right, St Nicolas (Santa = Saint, and Claus is a contraction of Nicolas). If you want to know more about Santa (aka St Nick, Kris Kringle etc), read this excellent blog post from author Roseanna White on the origins of Santa Claus.

My biggest concern with The Innkeeper of Bethlehem is that mixing up the stories of Jesus and Santa Claus will teach children that neither is real when they grow old enough to learn the truth about Santa Claus. Parents, teach your children the truth, not half-truths that will confuse them.

I can’t recommend this to any Christian reader except perhaps as an object lesson for teens or adults as to how we can dilute the gospel by misusing words and misrepresenting truth.

The author provided a free copy of the ebook in order for me to give an honest review. He may well wish he hadn’t.

Review: Heaven Sent by Amanda Bews

A Book of Two Halves

Heaven Sent is a contemporary young adult novel set in Australia and New Zealand. While it had some real strengths, there were also some weaknesses, and these outweighed the strengths, at least for the first half of the novel. The second half was better—but I almost didn’t get that far.

The back cover blurb talks about “one drunken mistake”, a “disappearing boyfriend” and Heaven being “sent to New Zealand to ‘protect’ her father’s reputation”. On that basis, seemed pretty obvious what the “mistake” was, and just left the reader wanting it to happen already, so we could move on with the plot. Well, it took forever. The first quarter of the book was Heaven persuading the reader that she really wasn’t interested in sex. Almost eighty pages, and it could have been covered in ten. Then more introspection while Heaven realises what’s happened and fesses up to the parents (who are having their own relationship issues). All in all, we’re up to page 144 out of 279 before Heaven even sets foot in New Zealand.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the writing in this first half was good, but it wasn’t. It was slow and repetitive, with too much thinking and not enough action. The entire book is written in first person point of view from seventeen-year-old Heaven’s viewpoint, which perhaps explains the endless navel-gazing, but doesn’t excuse it.

But the really distracting thing was the editing. It seems the author and editors (yes, one editor and two copyeditors are credited) are allergic to the word “said”. No one says anything. They scowl, spit, yell, hurl, pipe up … and that’s just in the first chapter. It gets worse, with the addition of unnecessary adverbs, excessive punctuation (because it adds excitement, perhaps?!), and a minor character who starts as Ted and becomes Tom. On the plus side, the interior formatting was excellent and I liked the cover.

The pace in the second half was much better, and meant it was easier to skip over the writing issues (which were still there). The main problem in this second half was everything moved too fast. I don’t want to give spoilers so let’s just say this is Christian fiction (specifically, Seventh Day Adventist fiction), and 130 pages wasn’t long enough to make the inevitable progression in Heaven’s character arc credible. Sweet, yes, but not believable.

Overall, I give Heaven Sent one star for the first half and four for the second. Recommended for teenagers looking for issues-based Christian fiction, for fans of authors such as Elaine Fraser and Michelle Dennis Evans.

Merry Christmas!

May the peace of God be with you all this festive season.

Review: Veiled at Midnight by Christine Lindsay

Exciting Historical Romance

Veiled at Midnight is set in the final days of British rule in India, a time of uncertainty as the country moved towards self-government after two hundred years. It was also a time of political unrest due to the spectre of Partition: the division of India into two countries based on religion. It’s a fascinating backdrop, and one that really adds to the plot.

Veiled at Midnight is the third book in Christine Lindsay’s Twilight of the British Raj series. It’s set a generation on from the first two books, so can easily be read as a standalone novel, as it focuses on brother and sister Cam and Miriam Fraser. Cam is an army officer who had a bad war and isn’t really coping with life until one day he sees Dassah, the Indian girl he and Miriam grew up with, the girl who suddenly disappeared after he kissed her. Circumstances bring them together again … but not for long.

Miriam is a confirmed spinster, devoting her life to her job as a teacher at a school for girls. She has her own romantic problems when she is pursued by a handsome army officer who threatens her understanding of herself and challenges her beliefs about her brother. It’s a complex and exciting plot with four strong lead characters--Cam, Dassah, Miriam and Jack—set against a fascinating historical backdrop, and a mix of the expected and the unexpected. Recommended.

Thanks to the author for providing a free ebook for review.