Three Novels

Original Sin: A Sally Sin Adventure
By Beth McMullen
5 of 10

I picked this book up off the new bookshelf in the library entirely because of the title.  I am heading into a sermon series on sin, and thought this might be a fun way to engage the topic.  The fun was there sometimes, but the topic was almost entirely missing.

McMullen tells the story of a mom who used to be a spy, code-named Sally Sin, and who finds her previous espionage adventures intruding on her new life with a husband and three-year-old.  This is really a chick-lit novel, and a mom with a toddler would probably find it funnier than I did.  Although I did find it humorous when the villain regularly shows up and is unable to follow the old scripts because a three-year-old is in the room.

My one big complaint about this book is that if you’re going to give a book a theological title, it seems to me that you should at least do a cursory study of what the phrase means and somehow include that in the plot.  Original sin is the theological idea that we all are unable not to sin.  Our will is bent in on itself.  I would imagine that the hero or the villain of a novel titled Original Sin would either win or lose based on someone’s inability to not mess up.  But what seems to happen is that Sally Sin always wins in spite of herself (perhaps a subtle nod to grace).  She’s not incompetent.  She’s actually very competent.  But her villain is always one step ahead of her, and she often finds herself kidnapped by him and then released by him.

I’m probably expecting too much from this book.  Or maybe I’m missing the something subtle that McMullen is doing.  The average person most likely won’t have the same motivation for reading this book as I did and will probably enjoy it much more than I did.

Pompeii
By Robert Harris
6 of 10

I was so enthralled with the first novel, Imperium, I read by Robert Harris that I had to read more, especially more of his ancient Rome historical fiction.  Imperium was so good that it was inevitable that whatever I read next wouldn’t live up to it.

The plot of Pompeii is fairly obvious: a city is buried by a volcanic eruption.  Harris manages to tell a tale of intrigue, corruption, and romance in the couple of days leading up the catastrophic event.  There were a couple of good twists and turns, but nothing like Cicero’s ability to use rhetoric, or the art of speech, to outmaneuver disaster.  Of course, I am someone who must use his voice and language skills every week to preach!

Caleb’s Crossing
By Geraldine Brooks
6 of 10

Geraldine Brooks supposedly wrote a historical novel about the first Native Americans to attend Harvard, but I think this was really a novel about a young woman, Bethia, who grew up alongside those natives.  Brooks does an excellent job describing the culture of the early settlements and how it was stacked against certain groups like women and natives.  Bethia shows more academic progress than her older brother simply by overhearing their father teach him lessons, but because she is a woman, she is not given the same opportunities to learn.  She becomes a pawn moved around for the benefit of the men in her life.  There is a particularly difficult moment when she is required to publically confess to the church the disrespect she showed her brother, which was mostly just telling the truth about him.  It makes me glad to be living in a more merciful and graceful church.

If I have one quibble it is this.  The tricky part in writing historical fiction is not allowing modern sensibilities to enter into the characters.  Overall Brooks has done a good job at keeping the characters in the 1600s, but at times Bethia sounds more like a modern woman than a woman from the seventeenth century.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin
Conspirata (A Novel of Ancient Rome) by Robert Harris