Book Reviews

Summary: Jon Darrow, Spiritual Director and mystic, feels called to leave his role as an Anglican monk and return to the world.

I am revisiting the Starbridge series ten years after I first read it. I have some notes about the series in the review of Glittering Images (the first book) that are relevant to Glamorous Powers. However, I am trying to avoid too much of the story as I revisit the series so that anyone that has not read the series can read these posts without significant spoilers.

Jon Darrow is present throughout the series, but it is Glamorous Powers, where he is the narrator and focus of the story. Darrow is the oldest reoccurring character in the series. He was born in 1880. He married fairly young as a Navy chaplain, but as happens throughout the series, his wife dies young. His mother-in-law helps raise the two children, and after WWI, Darrow becomes a prison chaplain, mostly on death row (he is opposed to the death penalty) until his children are raised. Once the children are out of the house, he becomes an Anglican Monk (there are celibate Anglican monks and nuns, many of Darrow’s age were inspired by the Oxford movement’s return to Anglo-Catholicism). Eventually, Darrow rose to become Abbot of the Granchester Abbey, which primarily offers spiritual direction and retreats for clergy and theology students from Cambridge.

From his role as abbot, Darrow has a vision, which he believes is calling him to leave the cloister and return to the world. This book breaks the pattern of crisis and then spiritual direction and instead starts early with spiritual direction. Part of what I appreciate about the series is that there are a variety of spiritual directors. In this case, the spiritual director is the Abbot General of the order, Francis Ingram. He is, in many ways, the opposite of Darrow. Darrow is mystical, aesthetic, and from a lower-class background. Ingram is upper-class, very rational, and enjoys the finer things in life. Ingram helps Darrow explore the vision and whether it is a call from God. It is not ever discussed in these terms, but this is a spiritual direction of discernment.

Darrow does leave the order, and following the path of the series, he gets himself into a mess because of his pride, his background and the false sense of trying to bring about God’s will in the way that Darrow wants it to happen. God redeems his sin and graciously works all things together for good. But Darrow is broken, which allows him to confront his past, upbringing, early marriage, and children in ways he has been unable to do previously.

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Summary: A promising young theology professor is sent to investigate a bishop, leading to a romance, a breakdown, and a recovery. 

A few months short of a decade ago, I brought this book on vacation. It was my 40th birthday, and we had publicly announced that my wife was pregnant with our first child. So we went on our first cruise, and I devoured the first several books in the series. (I bought the following several books on kindle when in port.)

Before reading the series, I had not understood the concept of Spiritual Direction. I may have heard of the words (although, at this point, I am not sure), but it took the fictional portrayal in Glittering Images for the concept to sink in. Glittering Images is melodramatic fiction. There are fundamental weaknesses to this book and the series that are more visible to me now with some distance, but it was transformational. When I came home, I asked around for a spiritual director. I did not find anyone around me to give me a recommendation. So I looked up the directory on Spiritual Direction International (which has changed its name to Spiritual Companions International) and contacted the closest one to me geographically, just a few minutes from my home. (I would recommend this directory at this point.) I am still meeting with him nearly ten years later, although he has moved twice, and for the past five years, we have been doing video conference meetings. I started training to be a spiritual director about four years ago, and I have been working as a spiritual director for several years (very part-time.)

Back to the book, broadly, the series is historical fiction based on the 1930s to the 1960s focusing on Church of England clergy. Most books have a clergyperson in a spiritual and personal crisis, leading to some breakdown. And then the second part of the book is focused on a spiritual director helping to explore the roots of the crisis and work together toward healing. In this book, Charles Ashworth, a theology professor and Cathedral Canon, is sent on a secret investigative mission to preemptively avoid what might become a public disaster.

I am less of a fan of the first part of these books. I don’t like watching people make bad decisions that cause problems for those around them. However, part two draws me to the series, where people explore the psychological and spiritual causes of their problems and seek to heal the relational connections that have been harmed through sin.

Over the past several years, I have investigated trauma and spiritual abuse more intentionally. Unfortunately, the series, written from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, are not as cognizant of trauma and spiritual abuse as I would like. That isn’t to say there is no awareness, but there are problems.

I want to acknowledge some of the problems before moving on. Most of the books center around the sexual sin of the clergy. I think sexual sin, as described in the series, should be disqualifying, not just temporarily (as the books suggest), but permanently because of the harm it causes and the power abuses involved. The books, even as they often complain about too much Freudian pop psychology, have quite a bit of Freudian pop psychology. Third, most of the books have one of three different spiritual directors that have what is termed in the book as “psychic gifts.” These psychic gifts operate as near magic that distracts from how spiritual direction works outside the books in the real world. I think that Howatch is trying to take seriously charismatic and mystical gifts. But while it provides interest for the books, and I appreciate the mystical aspects, the near magic, which is usually presented as a power of the Holy Spirit, is separate from the role of traditional spiritual direction.

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Summary: Spiritual formation is about encountering God, not gaining knowledge. 

It has been about 18 months since I finished my spiritual direction training. That training was an Ignatian program, although we were not trained to give the whole exercises as Trevor Hudson has done. Ignatius’ exercises have plenty of depth for a wide variety of introductions, and I think Hudson’s choice to use Ignatius and Dallas Willard as conversation partners was a good choice.

Good spiritual writing is hard. Not just because it is hard to use human language to describe both mystical realities and an indescribable God but because it is hard to say something “new.” I put new in parenthesis because very little is actually new in spiritual writing. Culture is always changing, and the situations and emphasis are changing. But the rough concepts do not change much. Dallas Willard is helpful but can be a bit dense and hard to understand. Ignatius is distant in time and requires help with translation to a modern context. Trevor Hudson has written a fairly short and readable book about what it means to seek after God and how to do that.

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Summary: Georgie and Darcy are “invited” to spend Christmas with the royal family. 

This past fall, I reread the Inspector Gamache book to prepare for the 18th book in the series. I enjoyed reading the series back to back instead of once a year because I saw subtle connections between the books I missed when I read them a year apart. But the other part is that the Inspector Gamache books have a depth to them that allows for rereading and the quality across the series is high enough that I want to reread them all.

I have continued to read the Royal Spyness series (which I originally started about the same time I started reading the Inspector Gamache series) because it is light cotton candy. A bit of fluff is enjoyable now and then. I read this in print in two days. The books are not long, and they read quickly. But I can’t imagine rereading the whole series or reading more than two or three in a year because they don’t hold my interest well.

I am reading this one more than a year after it was released because I didn’t want to pay full price for a book I will not reread and do not care about that much. The $1.99 I paid was worth it, but I wouldn’t have paid much more because the series has stalled.

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Summary: The movement for Civil Rights prior to the Civil War is an under-told story and one which is important to the context of both the Reconstruction Era and the later Civil Rights movement of the 20th century. 

Until Justice Be Done provided historical context for an era in which I did not have a lot of background. I have studied the Revolutionary War period and the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. Still, my understanding of the history between the Revolution and the Civil War has primarily been through individual biographies, and Until Justice Be Done was helpful. (It was also on the shortlist for finalists for the Pulitizer as well as several other book awards which both confirms what I thought about the writing and verified the quality of the historical work.)

There were five big takeaways for me from the book.

First, the English poor laws were intended to require the care of the poor but were used both in England and the US as a way to keep the poor out of local communities, which turned the original purpose of those laws on its head. I could not help but think of Jesus’ comments about technically following the law but missing the point of the law (Matt 15:4-10, Mark 7: 1-23) when the religious leaders were claiming that they did not have resources help the poor because they had pledged money to God.

“But race was not the only kind of difference that was significant in this society, and many of the racist laws in Ohio and elsewhere were built atop laws designed to address challenges of poverty and dependency. These legal structures dated back to the sixteenth century and the English tradition of managing the poor. Local governments in England had responded to a rising population of mobile poor people and their demands for aid by establishing regulations designed to distinguish between those who belonged in the community and those who did not. The core idea in the English poor-law tradition was that families and communities were obliged to provide for their own dependent poor, but not for transients and strangers.” (p4)

Second, as hinted at in the quote above, skin color (race) was used to permanently mark people as “other.” Even when used appropriately, the poor laws were temporary categories. Ideally, someone who was poor and who was supported by the community could reach an economic status where they were no longer poor. The temporary status as “poor” became a permanent marker even for non-poor racial minorities. (This was primarily applied to Black residents of the US in the late 18th and early 19th century, where the book is concerned. But it was also applied to Native Americans and, to a lesser extent, Chinese on the west coast. Primarily this was about anti-Black racism, but it included others as well when there were other racial categories present.)

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Summary: Gamache and Beauvoir’s first case together is introduced in flashback as a mystery in Three Pines slowly unfolds.

This fall, I have reread the entire Inspector Gamache series because I was asked to contribute an essay to an online collection of essays inspired by the Gamache series. Yesterday my essay was posted. And next week, there will be a discussion of A World of Curiosities.

I cannot think of another series that has kept my interest after 18 books. Inevitably with a series so long, there has to be an exploration of the characters in ways that will not entirely make sense of the timeline until this point. We previously know that Gamache got Beauvoir from his exile as an officer in charge of evidence lockup because no one wanted to work with him. A World of Curiosities explores that first case together and fills in the back story. Of course, new characters are introduced in ways that do not entirely fit in, but new characters must keep being introduced to the series to keep it fresh.

One of my minor frustrations with the series is that the Three Pines and the surrounding community expand and contract to fit the storyline. Again the community expands, and the history of Three Pines is explored. I appreciate most of this because it brings depth to the series to thicken the characters and setting. I want to say having finished the book about a week ago, I did enjoy the book, and I might go ahead and reread it before the end of the year.

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Summary: An adopted 12-year-old boy suddenly discovers he is not who he thought he was.

Middle-grade books regularly have the concept that the main character is not who they thought they were, especially if they are orphans. This is a classic literary feature because it fits into middle-grade development. Of course, most readers will not be orphans who may secretly be important, but readers can still think about what it would mean to be someone else.

Orion Kim is 12 years old. He is handy with tools and can fix many things, but he is not very coordinated or popular. Very early in the book, he finds out that his grandmother is not his grandmother due to someone attempting to kill him and someone else defending him. Not long after, he finds out that he is not from Earth, but he is “starborn,” and he is taken away from the only home he has known (on Earth) and hides from his attacker on an alien world.

There are classic literary devices that work because they are classic. For example, middle-grade readers may already be familiar with characters attending a new special school to learn about their new powers. Or a group of characters working together to discover the things the adults around them won’t tell them. This is not to say that Orion and the Starborn is cliche; I don’t think it is. But as a nearly 50-year-old who has been reading middle-grade books for decades, I can see the literary references beneath the story.

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Summary: Using the life and work of GK Chesterton to grapple with North American Indigenous art, history, and Christianity. 

Every review of The Everlasting People is required to say how unique of a project this is. Unfortunately, I am not equipped to evaluate the project because I am not deeply familiar with either Native American history and art or GK Chesterton. I have some familiarity with both, but not enough to know if Milliner is distorting the record, only enough to be able to follow along with the argument of the book. This is one of the weaknesses of truly original conceptions. That isn’t to say I think this is distorting, only that I do not have the background to evaluate it.

I like books based on lecture series. They are often short, usually based on 3 or 4 lectures, sometimes with a response. But they are often thoughtful about unique topics and designed for a general readership.

If I had to summarize what The Everlasting People, a book that is hard to categorize, is about, I would say it is attempting to give people, generally categorized as white, tools to grapple with their personal and communal cultural history so that there can be a way to move forward in more than just guilt. White guilt, when it is limited to just guilt, does no one any good. The way forward needs to be centered on some process of restoration of relationship (personally and communally). This isn’t “forgive and forget”; this is “remember, process, and work to restore.”

Dr. Matthew Milliner is using his tools as an art historian to tell not just the story of the way that we have forgotten (intentionally) our history in the US around Native American subjugation using art, cultural icons, geography, and local history but also using the theological and cultural thinking of GK Chesterton.

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Summary: A memoir framed as a description of 40 songs. 

I am a man of a certain age. One of the first CDs I ever purchased was Rattle and Hum. I had a bootleg VHS version of the Rattle and Hum movie, and I watched it so many times it was warped. I saw the ZooTV tour during my first year in college. I was excited to see the Red Rocks venue because U2 had recorded there. (My kids like Sing 2, which has a Bono character and several U2 songs, and I keep trying to get them to listen to more U2 without much real success so far.)

I cannot fully read this apart from the nostalgia of growing up a U2 fan. I started listening to this as an audiobook because I assumed it would include clips of songs, and I like listening to memoirs in the author’s voice when that makes sense. I eventually also purchased the kindle edition because I wanted to see what additional material might be in the print version that was not in the audiobook. The audiobook and the print text were close but not entirely the same. There were several times when Bono would expand a line or add a sentence that was not in the print version, but nothing was fundamentally different. I noticed two misspelled words in the kindle book that were read correctly. But most important was that because the book is framed using songs, the print version just has a few lines of the song at the start of each chapter, and the audiobook has Bono singing at least those lines, often 1-2 minute sections of the songs. I assume they didn’t put the whole songs in for licensing reasons. 

The main thing in the print version that was not in the audiobook was Bono’s drawing and some photographs. While I looked at them all, I don’t think it was a reason to get the print version, and I think the audiobook version is the one to get if you do audiobooks. I am not a fan of Bono’s interviews on TV. He comes across as a bit too earnest and sometimes too silly. But as a narrator, he had a consistent low rumble to his voice. He read with emotion and felt like he was telling a story. One person I know thought the book felt too self-indulgent and pompous, but he read the book in print, and I think that the tone of the audiobook would have made it hard to have that impression. Much of the book was self-deprecating and making fun of himself.

I am not a fan of highly-produced audiobooks. I think it usually distracts from the book. But in this case, the production appropriately added to the book because it was about the music. There were occasional sound effects, but they had a purpose. Bono did do some voices as he told stories, but they also felt appropriate and not like he was trying to do their voices but trying to tell a story.

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