152. A book that shall not be named

This was a reasonably entertaining book, and I read the whole thing, but it was a tad annoying. It was a detective story published by an evangelical Christian company, and it adhered to the conventions of too much evangelical Christian fiction. By this, I mean that God makes it clear (sometimes through capital letters) how characters are to behave. If the characters do what God tells them, they're blessed; if they don't, then every area of their life starts to fall apart. I heard this formula from many people when I was growing up, and maybe it even works for some of them. But I think creating the expectation that it will work is doing a disservice to God--who after all, as these same evangelical Christians are so eager to tell us, isn't some cosmic fairy godfather--and to the people who read these books and want to believe this. These sorts of narratives, in which everything is neatly wrapped up with a little pink bow by the end, do a disservice to the complexity, ambiguity, and pain of real life.