Book Reviews

Summary: Twelve year old Eva has grown up in an underground shelter, all alone with just a robot who has cared for her from birth. When the shelter is breached, Eva confronts a world unlike anything she could have imagined.

Young adult fiction is a comfort food of books, but I have not kept my finger on new books coming out, so I am frequently finding books that are new to me, but not new books. I stumbled on Wondla because it is a cartoon series on Apple TV+. I hadn’t seen anything about it before I stumbled one it, but I was looking for something that that I could watch with my kids and my teenage nieces. My kids are starting to get old enough to be able to watch things that have some tension in them.

We binged six of the seven episodes in a weekend and then watched the last a few days later. Season one of the TV series is the first book of the trilogy. And presumably the second season (which is coming but doesn’t have a release date) will be the second book. In print, each of the books is roughly 450 pages. I read all three in less than 2 weeks. The first I read as an ebook from Kindle Unlimited, the next two I was able to check out from our local library in print. The Kindle editions were fine, but the print has great art in color that does not come out as well in a black and white kindle file.

A rough rule of thumb is that the intended audience of a book is the same approximate age as the main protagonist. In this case, Eva is 12 and she turns 13 in the context of the story. The cartoon has moved Eva to 16 years old and that shifts the cartoon story just a bit. In many ways, I think 12-13 is the better target. While Eva is very mature for her age, shifting her to 16 changes the story a bit for the 2nd and 3rd books. I haven’t seen the 2nd and 3rd seasons of the show, but my guess is that there will be a bit of a romance in them, which doesn’t make sense for a 12 year old. But more importantly the younger age makes more sense of Rovender Kitt (Rovee), the wise Alien who finds Eva and teaches her about the forest and becomes a father figure to her. It is not that older teens do not also need father figures, but I think the connection and the dependence works better with the younger age.

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Summary: A widower inherits a British estate, but he may lose it before he is even unpacked. 

I am trying to read more fiction. This is a goal that I have almost every year. I really am conviced that fiction is important, but I have a tendancy to gravitate toward “important” books. I saw that the Book of Hours was on sale and I picked it up. I read his book The Maestro when I was in high school and I enjoyed it. It was a book about a musician who was a real artist and as he came to faith he saw he could incorporate his faith and art. I real a lot of Christian novels as a teen and I have read very few past my teen years because so few felt worthwhile.

As I read The Book of Hours I couldn’t help but think about it as a novel version of a Hallmark movie. I enjoy a Hallmark movie very now and then, but I don’t really confused it for great art. It is fluff and fluff every now and then if fine. As much as can enjoy some fluff here and there, I do think that Karen Swallow Prior’s critique of Christians as overly attached to Victorian values, and mistake those Victorian values for Christian ones fits here. This is a sentimental novel that deserves the critique that Prior has for senatamental novels. But it also fits all of the standard Hallmark tropes. A widower from out of town inherits an estate. He is penniless and finds the estate is going to soon be sold for back taxes. He meets the town’s young (single) doctor who immediately hates him for not caring about the property and allowing it to fall into disrepair. There is a greedy developer to provide some tension.

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Summary: A graphic novel biography of Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship.

This is the fifth book I have read by John Hendrix. I have written about his biographies of John Brown and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This is more like the biography of Bonhoeffer than John Brown. The biography of John Brown was about 40 pages and more similar to Hendrix’s books about Jesus in that length and format. The longer biographies, this one and the Bonhoeffer one, are a combination of text and graphics. It is not unusually for there to be 200 words on a page. Some pages are predominately graphics, especially the sections where a lion and a wizard are narrating the story. But there are long sections that are more text heavy.

And when you think about these as graphic novels, you should think about a graphic novel as a format, not an age target. These are readable for late teens, but they are not children’s books. There are long sections about the academic meaning of myth, or how stories communicate truth. I have seen a couple of reviews that thought those longer sections were not as helpful, but I can see their point. This isn’t a biography of the two men as much as it is a biography of the conversation that Tolkien and Lewis and another friend had about viewing Christianity as “true myth” that helped Lewis overcome his objections to Christianity.

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Summary: A comprehensive biography from an admiring, but critical author.

I picked up His Very Best on audiobook a few days before President Carter passed away. I had wanted to read one of the recent biographies for a while, and the sale price, and then his death moved it to the top of my list.

It is very clear that Jonathan Alter wanted to reassess Carter’s presidency and his place in history. Alter frames the book with Carter’s attempt to do his “very best.” The line is from a question that Carter was asked when he was applying to work with Hyman G. Rickover in the Navy’s nuclear program. Rickover asked Carter if he had done his best while at the Naval Academy. And Carter told him that he had not always done his best. But that question haunted Carter and much of his life, he did attempt to his best all the time.

Carter had the mind and personality of an engineer. He expected that when people were presented with the facts they would come to the same conclusions he did. One of Carter’s real strengths as the president was that he often thought about the long term in ways that many politicians do not. Carter was far from perfect, but many of the most important results of Carter’s legacy took years and in some cases decades, to start to be seen.

Carter was split. He is known for his ability to talk with people do the long term work to bring people together. But he also was known by Congress at the time as not particularly caring about their opinion and at times being outright offensive. The Panama Canal deal happened in large part because his people did cut deals and drew people into supporting a project that was important for the long term. He spent weeks meeting in small groups with not just congress, but with local and state officials who would provide cover for Congressional members who he needed to take a hard vote. But Carter’s health care plan, which he knew was of significant importance to Ted Kennedy, was announced without telling Kennedy or consulting him in its development. Carter often offended his own party even more than the GOP because Carter opposed local initiatives as unhelpful pork projects.

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Summary: Part biography, part spiritual direction guidebook, part instruction in wisdom.

I have known of Evelyn Underhill for a long time, but she was one of those characters of Christian history who I have never read or read about and only had vague impressions of. One of the people I meet with for spiritual direction was talking about her and that prompted me to pickup The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill by Robyn Wrigley-Carr.

This is a recent book, it came out in 2020, but I am somewhat surprised I haven’t heard more about it. As someone who is a spiritual director, I think this would be a great book to use in a training program. It is not directly a spiritual direction training book, but the book is framed by looking at the influence of her own spiritual director, Baron Frederick von Hügel, and how they both were shaped and how that shaping impacted their work as spiritual directors. My own training was very helpful and it included a number of the old books that shaped Underhill and von Hügel, but with the exception of reading Ignatius of Loyola’s autobiography, there was very little discussion of how biography and social position impacts your work as a spiritual director.

This is not a full biography, and I would like to read a full biography of Underhill, but it contains enough biographical content to make sense of Underhill’s life. At times, spiritual formation can be overly oriented around ideas and practices and not pay attention enough to other areas. Underhill was fascinated with mysticism. Both her and von Hügel wrote books about mysticism before they met. But part of what the book points out about their spiritual direction relationship is that von Hügel was concerned that Underhill was too focused on mysticism and the intellect. His guidance drew her first to see the church as a necessary component, not because we need the church to be saved but because it grounds us in a community of people. There was a theological component to von Hügel’s guidance, as one of the more well known Catholic thinkers in England at the time, he believed in the sacramental nature of the Eucharist. Underhill was Anglican, but also came to believe that the Eucharist was an important mystical reality. Together they came up with a minimum and maximum approach to spiritual practices for Underhill. Because she was a writer as a profession and primarily worked as a spiritual director in retreat settings, she had a lot of seasons of extreme busyness. When she was busy, she had a minimum of 2 Eucharist services a week that she attended. But she also had a maximum of 4 so that she was also encouraged to have a wide variety of experiences.

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Summary: After the inital win against the Magicians from Nod, Wren, Simon, Jack and others go to Nod to try to bring the Magicians and the Alchemists back together. 

I tried to be pretty vague about my discriptions of A Sliver of Stardust because I do not like spoiling fiction books. But it is pretty hard to discuss a series without at least some spoilers for earlier books. In A Sliver of Stardust, teenager Wren discovers that not only is stardust capable of being used to perform magic, but that she is both able to do the magic and gifted in a rare type of magic that hasn’t been seen since there was a civil war among those who use the stardust. Users of stardust split into Magicians and Alchemists and the Magicians traveled to another planet (Nod).

The Magicians were led by a man that was defeated at the end of the first book and presumed dead. Wren at the start of the second book is still recovering from injuries and Jack, a spy from Nod whom she had saved is even worse. It appears that he is no longer able to do magic, but he is also now on the side of the Alchemists and wants to bring those who used and manipulated him to a type of justice.

Wren is called by the Ashes (magical beings) to come to Nod and work to fix the tainted stardust before it harms Earth. That starts the main story of A Legend of Starfire.

I know of Marissa Burt because of her work on a book about Christian Parenting that I found out about via twitter. I know her as a Christian pastor’s wife who is outspoken about abuse and who is theolgoically informed and who regularly writes about church politics and theology. A Sliver of Stardust and A Legend of Starfire are young adult fantasy books without any explicit faith themes. They were published by a secular press (HarperCollins) and her bio on the books doesn’t mention her faith or being a pastor’s wife. But there are subtle nods to faith here and there.

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Summary: Wren Matthews discovers that magic is real, and that not only can she perform magic (and that not everyone can) but that her magical gifts are quite unusual. 

I am a fan of good young adult or middle grade fantasy, but I do not pick up new authors randomly very often. I found Marissa Burt on twitter and after following her for several months and being aware of her work on a book about Christian parenting, I notice her comment about her earlier books. I put them on my kindle watch list and then picked up A Sliver of Stardust when it was on sale for audible. And then the kindle edition about a month later when it was also on sale.

I decided that I needed a bit of light fiction at the end of Christmas break and started to read A Sliver of Stardust. Within less than 24 hours, I had finished the book, alternating between reading on kindle and listening to the audiobook. I immediately purchased the second book in the series and a few days later starting reading it as well.

One of the complaints about middle grade and young adult fantasy is that it follows some traditional themes. The main protagonist is often a bit isolated. They often have a history of “clumsiness” or things happening which they can’t quite explain. They are “chosen” and welcomed into a world of magic that those around them (often their parents) cannot see or participate in for one reason or another. There is often a mentor or teacher who instructs the in the magical arts. And there is often an evil person who wants power, or wants to use the power they have, for wrong purposes.

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