Parchment Girl is blogging regularly again and has a newly updated blog design. I appriciate her reviews because she reviews so many books I would not otherwise pick up. It is not that I don’t like Christian Fiction, it is that I just don’t really trust it. I have read so much bad Christian fiction, books that are neither realistic about life as it happens in the world, nor books that reflect the God that I know. So much Christian fiction just feels like it was designed to make the reader feel better. A very light tension and conflict, salvation and then all is right and everyone lives happily ever after.
Parchment Girl, while she read many other books beside Christian fiction seems to have a gift for reading and thinking about Christian Fiction in a way that I appreciate. Here is the first paragraph of her review:
Into the Free is a story that exists in a grey area. Millie’s father is brutally abusive towards her mother, but the author doesn’t reduce him to the role of a stereotypical villain as one might expect. By the end of the novel he reads more as a tragic character””a tortured soul who couldn’t help his violent urges. I have mixed feelings about this. While I fully believe in the concepts of mercy and grace, I feel like Jack was let off the hook for his actions. I don’t want to oversimplify the book by reviewing it as though it were a political statement; it’s just something I thought a lot about while reading it.
continue reading the rest of the review on Parchmentgirl.com