Book Reviews

Summary: Jane Eyre meets Sixth Sense, “I see dead people.”

I like the concept of remixes or retellings of classic stories. The very nature of a well known story means that you can retell it by changing the perspective or the gender of the characters and you can easily have a cultural commentary or additional humor, or simply get to hint at part of the story to reference ideas without fully developing them in ways that is not possible for a completely original story.

That being said, I came into My Plain Jane having just finished My Lady Jane and I had a set of expectations that were not met. I thought I knew what to expect and the books are just different. My unmet expectations created a hurtle that I would not have had, if I had started with Plain Jane. But I had to get over my expectations of what the book was going to be. My Lady Jane was a historical figure that was generally told accurately, but with the addition of shape shifting magic (into animals).

My Plain Jane is riffing off of Jane Eyre, which is a fictional story. I read Jane Eyre just over a year ago, the story is fairly fresh in my mind. This is a bit of a spoiler, but My Plain Jane alternates telling the story from several perspectives. Charlotte Bronte is a teen, almost finished with her boarding school. Her real life best friend is Jane Eyre, a barely older orphan who was also at the school but now is a teacher. Charlotte is always writing and Jane is always painting or drawing; they do not have a lot of friends at the school outside of one another.

The main story really starts when Jane sneaks off to a local pub because she hears that a somewhat secret organization, Royal Society for the Relocation of Wayward Spirits will be there. That organization is an early Ghostbusters society. In this story, people who have briefly died and come back to life can see ghosts. The Society is mostly made up of people who can see ghosts and they go around the country helping to remove problem ghosts. Jane can see ghosts and one of her best friends, Helen, is a ghost. One of the tension points is that Jane wants to keep secret her ability to see ghosts because she is afraid of what people will think if they know she can see ghosts.

Read more

Summary: A girl finds herself with powers she did not ask for, without a name or a family.

Remote Control is the seventh book I have read by Nnedi Okorafor, but the first in the last four years. I continue to like this length of book, a long novella or a short novel. The print copy is 160 pages or just over 4 hours in audiobook. That length has enough time for real character development but tends to have a simpler plot structure and less fluff. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good long novel at times, but not every novel needs to be 350-450 pages.

Remote Control was written in 2020, and I think it reflects that time. It is a dark novel. Many of Okorafor’s novels have dark premises or realities to them. She Who Fears Death is a post-apocalyptic novel about a girl born after a violent rape. Binti is about an African Teen on her way to college on another planet and who witnesses everyone on the ship she is traveling on slaughtered before negotiating a peace. The Akata series is more for young adults and not quite as heavy, but it still deals with some difficult topics.

Read more

Summary: A very fictionalized retelling of Lady Jane Grey’s marriage and assent to the throne with magic.

My day job involves very significant data entry several times a year. This allows me to listen to audiobooks, but at some point, my brain begins to shut down, and I need not only fiction but very light and humorous fiction. My Lady Jane fit the bill perfectly.

My Lady Jane is historical fiction, similar to how A Knight’s Tale is a historical fiction movie. That is to say, historical events VERY loosely inspire them but should not be understood as at all historically accurate. Many narrator notes throughout the book suggest things like, up until this point, the story has been relatively historically accurate, but after this point, no history book will tell it this way. Even without the notes, this is a fantasy book in which the characters turn into animals through magic.

Read more

Summary: Sophie, the eldest daughter of a hatmaker, is cursed by an evil witch and has to figure out how to break that curse. 

I am not sure why I have not previously read Howl’s Moving Castle. I know that I mistakenly thought that I had watched the movie. (I am pretty sure I watched Spirited Away and wrongly remembered it as Howl’s Moving Castle.) I was looking for some fiction last week and saw the audiobook at my library after seeing someone say on Twitter that they reread it every January. I picked it up on a whim and finished it in three days.

Howl’s Moving Castle is a book that I want to read again in print. I enjoyed the audiobook, but there are a few times when I think I missed small plot points because it was audio and not in print. There is depth in the story here but like many young adult books, there is a lot of the story that is rooted in misunderstanding. And some of that misunderstanding is the characters not understanding their own emotions.

Sophie, the protagonist, is a witch or magician, but she doesn’t not know it. Her lack of awareness of her gifts is the main plot point. She slowly comes to an awareness of her gifts as she comes to an awareness of her love for Howl’s, the self-centered womanizing wizard who is responsible for the moving castle. The magic has a video game and steampunk feel to it. It works, but it isn’t as much classic Mideavil sword and sorcery fantasy as it is a 19th-century world that has magic.

Read more

Summary: A discussion about how the rise of independent celebrity authors, pastors, speakers, musicians, and churches is a problem, not just because of abuse and a lack of accountability, but also because our culture is more focused on celebrities for their own sake. 

In some ways, Celebrities for Jesus is a book that I am not sure why it needed to be written. I say this not because it isn’t worth reading or because it isn’t a good book, but because much of the main point should be self-evident. I think we should know that as churches are more focused on the size and celebrity of their pastors, this will create a harmful culture, even if there is no overt abuse or harm. It should be clear that when a church is centered around a well-known leader, the church is not primarily about Jesus but about the leader. (Or the will of the leader is assumed to be the will of Jesus.)

In my life, I have been exposed to many megachurch leaders. Like many, I have read many books and watched many sermons by those leaders. But I have also been involved in small closed-door meetings with some megachurch pastors. And honestly most of those in the meetings are no longer in leadership. A few retired without scandal. But many, including James MacDonald and Bill Hybels, who are both profiled in the book, had significant scandals, and that scandal felt to me like it was just a matter of time from when I met them in the early 2000s. I also spent years as a member of a mega church without significant scandal, and in deciding to leave that church, the issue of celebrity was involved because it felt to me that the church was making decisions to continue to center the pastor in ways that made me concerned for the long term future of the church.

Despite my somewhat facetious question about why the book was written, it is helpful to think about what has shifted. Part of the early book is about the difference between fame and celebrity. I am oversimplifying here, but fame is about being well-known for a position, talent, or product (being a good writer, speaker, or musician). But as Beaty describes it, celebrity is a shift from being famous for what you have done to being known for being known. Celebrity, especially with the rise of social media and mass media, means we have a false “illusion of intimacy while drawing our attention away from the true intimacy available within a physical community.” Said more simply, Beaty says that the summary of the problem of celebrity is “social power without proximity.” Not only do celebrities influence us without us actually knowing them as a whole person, but in some sense, we do not want to know them as a whole person because to know someone as a whole person would break the illusion of intimacy and perfection that we have of celebrities.

Read more

Summary: The best critique of Christian Nationalism I have read, because Miller so clearly understands the reasons that Christian Nationalism can be attractive and reasonable.

There have been various books about Christian Nationalism; initially, they were all condemning, and more recently, a few made positive cases for Christian Nationalism. The Religion of American Greatness is a conservative (theologically and politically) case against Christian Nationalism, one that does mention but does not focus on Trump. And one that is generous in its assumptions about why some find the movement toward Christian Nationalism appealing.

His fifth chapter, Nationalism, Cultural Pluralism and Identity Politics, is a good example of where I agree broadly with the conclusions and disagree with how he got there. As a broad stroke, he points out the weaknesses of the Nationalist orientation and the methodology of using the state to maintain a particular cultural orientation over time. To illustrate this, he commends freedom of speech and the rule of law, which must be done for all to have a sense of fairness and equity. He uses the “Drag Queen Story Hour” complaint as an illustration and, I think, rightly critiques how it is used to stir up a culture war agenda. This brings him to consider whether Christian Nationalism is a type of identity politics. I understand this point, and I do not entirely disagree with it, but I think he misses the reasons that we need to repair past harm and how minority identity sociologically works. (Although he does have a stronger call for repair of past harm later in the book.) I believe that Christian Nationalists are acting as an identity group, but what needs to be teased out more is whether that identity group has justification in their complaint. (But that is more about sociology than political science.) Regardless of the accuracy of the complaints, his ability to take those complaints seriously is the book’s strength.

Read more

Summary: The biography of Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and one of the early Black leaders in the US. 

Many people may be slightly aware of Richard Allen, but not much about him. At least that describes me and why I decided to pick up Freedom’s Prophet. This quote from the introduction sets the stage for why Richard Allen is important.

“Allen did not live through these immense changes passively, a black man adrift in a sea of impersonal and malevolent forces. Rather, he shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the events swirling around him. As the most prominent black preacher of his era, he helped inaugurate a moral critique of slavery and slaveholding that shaped abolitionism for years to come. As one of the first black pamphleteers, he pushed not only for slavery’s demise but also for black equality. As a black institution builder, he spurred the creation of autonomous organizations and churches that nurtured African American struggles for justice throughout the nineteenth century. As a sometime doubter of American racial equality, he participated in black emigration to Haiti. As a leader of the first national black convention, he defined continent-wide protest tactics and strategies for a new generation of activists. Bishop Allen’s lifelong struggle for racial justice makes for a compelling and illuminating story—a tale about a black founder and African Americans in the early American republic.” (p5)

Richard Allen was born into slavery in 1760 and lived until the age of 71 in 1831. Like many who were enslaved, his family was split apart and sold as a child. He became a Christian through the work of early Methodists, who welcomed Black participation in the church. At 17, he joined the church and started to evangelize and preach. Through his preaching and evangelism and the preaching of a white abolitionist preacher, his owners became convinced of the evil of slavery. But his owners did not simply free him and others who were enslaved; he allowed them to buy their freedom. Richard Allen bought his freedom for the equivalent of about five years’ wages for an average laborer by age 20. When he was 24, he was officially ordained and spent two years as a circuit-riding preacher before becoming one of the ministers at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church.

Read more

Summary: An exploration of the thought of Dorothy Sayers. 

I picked up Subversive because it was free to me as part of the Audible Plus Catalogue (books that Audible subscribers can borrow without additional cost other than the membership.) I have been slowly working through a couple of books by Sayers a year over the past decade. I have finished all of her Wimsey full novels, and both read and listened to her play cycle, A Man Born to be King. I also read a book about Sayers and CS Lewis’ friendship and the lost novel that Jill Patton Walsh finished. I was not new to Dorothy Sayers, but I am also not a scholar of Sayers, so I am a bit wary of being annoyed by this book but without enough academic background to defend my annoyance well.

I think part of the problem is that I came in with inappropriate expectations. I was expecting an exploration of Sayers’ ideas but more biography. Subversive is not a biography; it is closer, instead, an attempt to introduce modern readers to Sayers, someone who is fairly unknown but who has exerted much influence. Because I was expecting more biographical details, I am sure my unmet expectations played a role in being annoyed by Subversive.

Read more