I really liked The Martian and Project Hail Mary. And I have heard a lot of negative things about Artemis. So even thought I bought it on audiobook at some point in time when it was on sale, I had not previously started it.

Artemis is different for Andy Weir and I am glad he tried something new. I didn’t like it as much as his other two books, but I also didn’t think it was as bad as its reputation. The protagonist is a 26 year old woman. Her father immigrated to the moon when she was six and she has grown up there. Her father is a devote muslim man, a welder, and for a variety of reasons, Jazz Bashara did not want to follow in the steps of her father.

I think Weir does have some problems writing a female protagonist. And he is writing a crook with a strong moral streak which is hard to do well. And the setting of the Artemis city on the moon, a small town with about 2000 permanent residents, but a lot of tourists, is also a hard setting to write well. Any small town has a problem being known as the local smuggler and I think Jazz is both smart and doesn’t seem to worry about that.

I think the main problem most reviews I have read have is that Jazz and most of the other characters are not particularly likable. She is fine. But she feels an obligation to her honor, while making a lot of bad decisions. She knows she has made a lot of bad decisions in her past, especially as a teen girl rebelling against her fairly strict father. But her actual father seems kind and caring and forgiving, which doesn’t seem to be what Jazz perceives him to be. Jazz has a lot of friends who care for her and would like to help her, but mostly she wants to make it on her own. And that seems to be trying to do everything with additional levels of difficulty turned up.

The Martian and Project Hail Mary are mostly books with a single guy trying to solve problems. And that isn’t this book. I broadly enjoyed Artemis and Jazz and her friends. But I also thought that the book needed more work to clean up plot holes and setting problems.

Artemis: A Novel by Andy Weir Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I read The Queen of Ebenezer about three years ago when it first came out. If you want a review without spoilers, I would read that original one. I have been trying to read more fiction this year, I wanted to revisit this one to see if I thought my daughter was ready for it and the publisher, Owl’s Nest, has been expanding their audiobooks. So I picked this up on sale a couple weeks ago and listened to it in two sittings.

The audiobook is well done. A clear narration with good production values that communicated the feel of the book exactly as it should be narrated.

And now to the spoilers.

This is a story about memory and regret. I will be honest that I had forgotten the ending. The book is about how Beatrice awakes in a swamp. She knows it is a magical swamp and that Tom, the king of the swamp, isn’t quite right. Her knowledge that she is in a magical world, but can’t remember before, is made more salient because she knows something isn’t right.

A young adult/middle grade reader may not pick up on all the clues, but as someone that had previously read it and knew the rough shape of the story, there are a lot of clues as to what is going on. But it also draws heavily on the magical. Again, this is a significant spoiler, but Beatrice and Tom were in a car accident. Death is searching for Tom. Beatrice was unconscious, but not near death as Tom is.

Part of what is revealed is the role that Beatrice played, not just as the girlfriend, but as the cause of the harm. So there is guilt and grief. I do think that some of the teenage rebellion that led to accident is a bit cardboard, but the point isn’t the rebellion, but the discovery of love and the desire to protect. Young adults have big feelings. And there needs to be places to explore those big feelings. And this is a great fictional exploration of the ways that big feelings matter, and that there can be consequences of rash decisions.

The Queen of Ebenezer by K.B. Hoyle Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I like novels that are about something. But I also don’t like novels “about something.” It is easy to joke about books that are doing the classic after school special, “on a very special episode of…”

The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell is a fiction book, but one that is largely about spiritual formation and counseling. I don’t object to fiction books dealing with harder things like a marriage falling apart or a man coming to deal with the ways he had repressed his emotions. I do object to the speed of the healing.

I don’t think it is suprising that Intervarsity Press, which also has a series of fiction books on spirituial formation with a group of women has another book that is similar, but written from a male perspective. The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell is different, but I have a similar objection to both, in that a fictional book often wants a cleaner ending and faster resolution than what happens in real life.

But I also was solidly engaged with the book. I thought it was well written. I thought the unfolding of the story worked well, even if too fast. And that there is real value in helping to illustrate what counseling and internal work can look like for Christians who take their faith seriously. There is always a problem with Christian men’s books that want to show what “real men” are like and just growl and “take charge”.

Elijah Campbell isn’t in touch with his emotions or his family history. He has been encouraged to repress things and his family of origin is a significant factor in that unhealthy patterns. I also think that it is a not insignificant that Elijah is a “successful” professional Christian who has done what he can to look good to others without dealing with the internal. But the main point here is that he should be involved with his emotion and that this is the path forward to becoming healthy enough to be a good husband and father.

I am a bit ambivalent about this The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell. On the one hand, I was engaged and devoured the book. I alternated between audio and kindle (both of which I picked up on sale, kindle is still on sale as I am writing). I finished in three days. But I also think that the story can be a bit heavy handed at times and is too neat and tidy.

The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell: A Novel by Kelly Flanagan Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I very much appreciated the biography of James Baldwin that Nicholas Boggs recently wrote. Part of how Boggs came to write the biography was coming across the out of print Little Man, Little Man and discovering eventually that the illustrator was not dead as he had been told, but very much alive.

Over a couple years Boggs was able to get a new edition of the book into print and interview Yoran Cazac and those around him several times. It was original research on an aspect of Baldwin’s life which had largely not been explored.

Once I finished the biography, I picked up a copy of Little Man, Little Man. It was Baldwin’s only children’s book. And it was written in large part because his young nephew asked James Baldwin to write a book about him. This was a book about a young boy and his community in Harlem in the mid 1970s.

Primarily I find it interesting as a historical artifact and an example of an alternate side of Baldwin. The art is interesting, but Cazac had never been to New York, and the characters based on Baldwin’s nieces and nephews were only a handful of snapshots from Baldwin to Cazac, so it is a somewhat dreamscape of Harlem.

The story is simple and involves introducing the reader to the characters and neighborhood and the task of going to the store. This is James Baldwin. Issues of poverty and grief and police brutality are present, but they are in the setting not central features of the story. The central feature is the characters and the way they are cared for by the community.

Little Man, Little Man is not a book I would recommend that every one go out and get. But it is a book that I would try to check out from your library and read. There are a couple of introductory essays, but the main book is a children’s book that can be read in an hour or less. I am glad that I could see another aspect of Baldwin’s writing and I am glad that Boggs was able to get a new edition into the world.

Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood by James Baldwin, Yoran Cazac illustrator Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition 

I read the Book of Hope as part of a book group that I am have been a part of for the past several years. This group is based at the Ignatius House, a Jesuit retreat house near me. I did my spiritual direction training here and I have been on three retreats here in addition to this book group since 2022. I rarely love the books that we discuss. But I love the people. The group is made up of mostly women in their late 60s to early 80s. There are a few outside of that, but it is most of the group. A bit over half the group is Catholic, most of the rest are Episcopal. The group is pretty solidly on the political left with a mix of theological perspectives. Generally these are people who appreciate contemplative spirituality and justice.

The Book of Hope is formatted mostly as an interview. Douglas Adams’ previous book was framed as a conversation between the Dali Lama and Bishop Tutu and it was called The Book of Joy. I am mixed on the format. Adams is a character in the book. He discusses his place in the conversation but mostly is setting up Jane Goodall to talk about her own thoughts on hope. Contextually, the hope is mostly about hope in the face of environmental catastrophe, but that isn’t the only issue in the book.

As the group discussed the book at our last meeting, most people thought the book got better the longer it went. The start was too much introduction and “chit chat”. The stronger sections on what hope was and how to work to build hope was good. When I started reading this I had just finished reading Racial Justice for the Long Haul, which was mostly also about the hope required to continue working on social issues in the face of discouragement. I am in process right now of reading A Systematic Theology of Love by Thomas Jay Oord, which is not about hope directly, but it is largely about the role of the problem of evil in our understanding of who God is and how God works in the world. Which is in part about these overlapping discussions.

The group I read this with is an overtly Christian group. It almost always opens and closes in prayer. We always discuss matters of faith. But this book was not particularly religious. It was vaguely spiritual, but whatever Goodall’s spiritual faith is rooted in, she was not talking about it. It is not that I think you need to have faith to have hope, but I do think that it is hard to talk about why you as an individual or as a group have faith and not discuss what that hope is rooted in. Goodall has hope because of youth, because she thinks that we are designed to have hope and that it is a survival skill. She thinks that hope can be encouraged and developed. And she is opposed to a faith surface level hope that denies hard things. But again, that felt too amorphous.

I was skeptical of the book going in because I suspected it may be too vaguely progressive for my preferences. And I think that is exactly what happened. But there was there in it that I thought were helpful. I learned more about Goodall’s life and family, but not much more. I learned more about her work of advocacy in the past few decades and I admire her for that. But I also wonder about what wasn’t said.

The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I have a lot of theological disagreements with Tim Keller even as I respect him and think the evangelical world would be much better off if there were more people like him. That is not to start with outlining of my disagreements, but to frame my thoughts here as largely those of an admirer who strongly disagrees.

I think my main issue, both with the book and with Keller is summed up in this quote.

“By his 1975 graduation from Gordon-Conwell, most of Keller’s enduring theological commitments had been settled. He subscribed to the Westminster Standards and Presbyterian-Reformed theology. He advocated for penal substitution, classic covenant theology, amillennialism, and what would later come to be known as a “complementarian” view of gender roles in the home and church. He believed in a historic, specially created Adam and Eve, in an old earth, and in the reality of biological evolution. He aligned with the neo-Calvinist approach to culture that combined evangelism and social justice. He resisted tying the church to one political agenda. He wanted the church to approach homosexuality with pastoral care without compromising the biblical sexual ethic. He prayed for the kind of revival Edwards saw in his day. The popularity of these beliefs might wax and wane, both inside and outside the church. But Keller didn’t do anything more than tweak some of these views after 1975.” (p103)

For every aspect that I really appriciate about Keller, his focus on ecumenical activity and evangelism and his advocacy of justice and a robust understanding of culture, there are others that are not just sometime I find problematic, but heralded here. For example, just after a long exploration of Keller’s understanding of the relationship to preaching about grace and not turning the Old Testament into moralism, Hansen talks about Keller promoting Jay Adams and biblical counseling, which expressly is about moralism. Or in the sections about how Kathy Keller became convinced that women should not be in church leadership, it was largely because of the teaching of Elizabeth Elliot that Kathy changed her position from being in favor of the ordination of women to being opposed to the ordination of women. But it was because of the seminary teaching and missionary experience of Elliot that Kathy and then Timothy Keller changed their minds. (Experience they would not have had if they were at a school that was more complementarian.)

Again, I can’t help but be influenced by my experience of Keller and those Keller was influenced by. Hansen emphasizes how Keller emphasized grace and revival and opposed the moralizing of the gospel, but then cites people who I have experience with as being those who emphasize external morality. My experience of Elliot seems to be the exact opposite of what Keller took from her.

Especially in the quotes from Keller about contextualization and justice, I find almost nothing that I disagree with about the relationship of the gospel to culture and the importance of justice to the reality of the gospel. I know that people like Brandon O’Brien who worked for Keller and whom I very much respect. But then I also wonder at how TGC seems to be so strongly wrong at most every cultural take on movies or music or art if it was so strongly influenced by Keller’s understanding of culture and contextualization. Keller strongly spoke to the sin of racism, but TGC seems to be more attracted to Doug Wilson’s orientation toward ethnic nationalism than Keller’s pluralism.

I appriciate that Hansen is not trying to write a traditional biography. He says the point of the book is to explore the people and thinkers who influenced Keller. And largely I think that focus makes sense. But this does verge on haigiography. And often it is comments that are show an insular perspective where this shows most strongly. In a discussion of the movie Babbette’s Feast, he says, that if you have seen the movie or read the book it is probably because of a recommendation from Tim Keller. And then says that Keller first mentioned the movie in 1997 in a sermon. But there was wide support of the movie by Christian from its earliest days. I saw it in the theater because my church went.

I also really wish there was more evaluation and exploration of Keller. I have the expanded version that was expanded after Keller’s death. But the concluding thoughts are thin. There is very little about how Keller has become someone to push back against by Aaron Renn and James Wood and others who seem to have this reverse nostalgia that thinks that starting a church in NYC in the late 80s and early 90s when NYC was less than 1% evangelical was some how “easy”.

I don’t think Hansen is probably the right person to do that deeper evaluation and it probably is too early to do that. But I think that is what this book needs. I am all for this type of exploration of his intellectual formation, but when the framing is that Keller really didn’t change any significant positions after 1975, then it is hard to really explore what those intellectual formation was all about.

I thought this was worth reading. I have respected him, even as I have disagreed with many things because he was someone that seems to have the ability to disagree and still relate. I learned things and I found people that I want to learn more about. But I also thought that this was too fluffy and could have been just as respectful and affirming of the man and dig a bit deeper.

Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation by Collin Hansen Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I would not have picked this up except it was part of a book group. I was not completely new to the topic. I have read Peter Brown’s book on the early church’s view of wealth. And I have read a bit of the early church fathers and general Christian histories and was broadly aware of the early church’s teaching against wealth.

The oversimplification of the early church’s teaching was that if you had wealth, it was for the purpose of caring for others. So if you hoarded wealth, then it was a misuse of wealth, and therefore sin.

The main task of the book is to document that not only hoarded wealth, but many of the aspects of our modern capitalistic system were viewed as either sin or at least it was viewed skeptically by the early church. I think broadly that point is well made. Although it is a bit repetitive because it uses the same or similar quote multiple times to make slightly different points.

The author is an democratic socialist who started out to write a Christian book against capitalism and thought it better to separate out the early church’s view into its own book. While I have read socialist and marxist arguments before, I think those aspects were less successful. The last two chapters were a defense of using marxist analysis and the need for creating a new imagination about the possibility of alternatives to capitalism. I think The Economics of Good and Evil does a better job looking at the different ways that economics and morality have been understood to work together over time and that type of book would be more helpful for a skeptical audience than this one.

I also think Tom Holland’s Dominion makes a good case for why care for the poor and vulnerable is an important feature of Christianity without needing to bring in marxist theory. (Rodney Stark also makes similar arguments in several of his books as well.)

I also think that part of the problem with the framing of this book is that more work needs to be done to look at the differences in how our economics works from the early church. The economics of the Roman era did not tend to charge interest except in predatory ways. So the early church’s opposition to interest and usury isn’t exactly the same as taking out a loan to buy a house or get student loans. Interest can absolutely be predatory and inappropriate. But interest is also a means of cooperation and there is little nuance here to understand how the different economics systems impact the way the economic morality works.

I am all for a more highly regulated economy that is designed to more explicitly protect the vulnerable and the poor. I would not consider myself a neo-liberal globalist. But I also know that we live in a capitalist system and there are ways to think about how to act with Christian morality in that system.

A project like this that helps to recover Christian origins of understanding the morality of economics can be helpful. I am glad that I read it, but I also think it is a bit dry and repetitive so I won’t strongly recommend it.

All Riches Come From Injustice: The Anti-mammon Witness of the Early Church & Its Anti-capitalist Relevance by Stephen Morrison Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition

There have been several biographies of James Baldwin. David Leemings’ biography is well worth reading, but Leeming was close to Baldwin, working at times as his secretary, travel companion and corespondent. That type of closeness has a benefit to a biographer, but it also has some weaknesses. I tend to think that we get a lot from biographies written by people close to the subject, but we also need a good biography from someone that isn’t personally close to the subject.

Nicholas Boggs is fulfilling that role for Baldwin. Leeming’s biography came out in 1995, but since that time there has not been a full biography of James Baldwin. Boggs main focus is connecting Baldwin’s writing to his life and his life to his writing. And at the same time showing how the fiction informed the non-fiction and how the non-fiction informed the fiction. Lemming discussed the writing as well, you can’t be a biographer of an author like Baldwin without discussing the writing, but I think Boggs made the writing a more central feature of the biography.

It is at the end of the book, one of the main contributions of this biography is a long exploration of Baldwin’s relationship with Yoran Cazac, a french painter that he originally met in Baldwin’s early days in Paris, but with whom they reconnected in the last 1960s. Baldwin had a “type”. He seemed to be attracted to men who were primarily attracted to women but still related well to him. There was a pattern with Lucien Happersberger, Engin Cezzar, David Leeming and Yoran Cazac and others. These men may not have had sexual relationships with Baldwin, but they were relationally intimate. Boggs suggests that Yoran Cazac was the last significant relationship that Baldwin had. Cazac was likely originally introduced to Baldwin through Baldwin’s mentor Beauford Delaney. And it is also likely that it was through Delaney that they became reacquainted.

Boggs found a copy of a out of print book that Baldwin wrote and Cazac illustrated, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of a Childhood. Boggs explored that little known book and found Cazac and befriended him and his family and worked to get Baldwin’s only children’s book republished. And in the mean time, interviewed Cazac and his ex-wife and children and those around him to get a view on a portion of Baldwin’s life that was almost barely mentioned in Leeming’s work. Part of what Boggs’ is illustrating in how he suggests that Baldwin’s writing was not just biographical or psychologically informative, but also descriptive of unrealized desires and realities. After Baldwin and Cazac reconnected, Cazac married Beatrice Mathews. When Beatrice was about six month pregnant with their first child (Cazac had another child from an earlier relationship), and her and Cazac were living in a rural Tuscan house without running water or electricity, Cazac and Baldwin spent about six weeks together at Balwin’s french home with Baldwin writing and Cazac painting and them spending time together. After the birth, Baldwin and his entourage went to Tuscany and Baldwin became the godparent of their son (just like Baldwin was the godparent of Lucian’s first son). And all of that was not unlike Giovanni’s Room where the one lover returns to his fiancé to get married and live out that domestic life. Baldwin wanted a domestic life and talked about marriage and children but never was able to achieve for long that domestic life that he kept trying to find.

At the end of the book in the author’s notes, Boggs talks about how Baldwin was an iconic figure for him as a gay man. Baldwin mostly did not talk about his relationships publicly. But he did write about relationships fictionally, and you can see the connections. Boggs explores Baldwin’s sexuality more than other biographers, but not focused on the details as much as the ways that Baldwin’s emotional life mattered to his writing live and vice versa. As Boggs notes several times, Baldwin often became physically sick after emotionally taxing relational difficulties. And many of his closest relationships where there was clear love, do not seem to have been sexually consummated (as with Delaney or Mary Painter and others). The point in the exploration is that this relational connection between people was important to who Baldwin was. Not just because being a gay black man was part of his identity, but because that identity influenced how he saw the world in ways that wasn’t true of everyone. Boggs asserts that while Baldwin did not always see the ways that oppression intersected across various identities, over time he came to see how sexism within the Black community or the racism within the gay community or the classism within the expatriate community intersected to mean that oppression does not simply run one way.

Greg Garret’s Gospel According to Baldwin makes a similar claim. I also think that Garret may have a better framing of how the homophobia of 1940-60s, when Baldwin is coming of age, prevented the deep connection that Baldwin seems to be forever searching for. The very nature of hiding your sexuality, even if Baldwin hid it less than many others did, makes it difficult to have an abiding public relationship. There is a reality to way that George Yancy’s framing of anti-sexist sexist works in Baldwin. Baldwin wanted a domestic household. But he also wanted someone to do the domestic work as he created. Beatrice Mathews says the same thing about Cazac to Boggs when he interviews her. She says that Cazac needed someone to care for everything around him so that he could paint. And that Baldwin and Cazac both wanted someone else to do that for them. There is a reality of sexism in that desire to have others care for you that seems common among many men that have imbibed a bit of narcissism in their approach to the domestic sphere. And it seems that Lucian and some of the others whom Baldwin loved, wanted to share the spotlight not just support his own spotlight. Baldwin often fell in love with artists or musicians or writers and tried to help them with their own creativity through funding or connections or lessons, but there seems to be a bit of jealousy, or at least control, that was part of the breakdown of many of those relationships.

Baldwin: A Love Story is a long biography. Many will not be interested in nearly 800 pages on Baldwin, let alone reading it paired with nearly 500 pages by Leeming, but I do wish that there was another 50 pages or so about the last decade of Baldwin’s life. James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era by Joseph Vogel is entirely about the end of Baldwin’s life framed around the work Baldwin produced at the end. And while I don’t think that Boggs completely ignores the 1980s, it is given much shorter shrift. There is more that could have been written there.

Boggs did correct the historical record in places where Baldwin’s memory was not perfect. I think the meeting with Bobby Kennedy in 1963 was handled as well as either of the two books that have been written just about that meeting. Boggs’ PhD in literature shines through in his literary analysis of Baldwin and as with any good biography, I want to read or re-read more of Baldwin. I am going to start with Little Man, Little Man, but also read Another Country and some more of the non-fiction that I have not previously read. Baldwin does seem to be just as relevant as he was in the 1950s and 60s. And I think Boggs rightly picks up on the ways that the narrative of creative decline that plagued Baldwin in the 70s and 80s was more about the lack of understanding of what Baldwin was trying to do, and the ways that he was changing styles and experimenting, especially around his plays, than actual decline. It was during this era that If Beale Street Could Talk was written and that has up until this point been my favorite of his fiction. I need to revisit it to see if that continues to be the case.

Mostly I read this in print, but when I saw that it had won some awards for the narration, I picked up the audiobook as well and listened to a couple hours of audio in the last quarter of the book. The audiobook is well done if you choose to listen to it. I am glad that I mostly read it in print because of the quotes and references are clearer in print.

There are always questions that I have after reading good biographies. And one of those is about Baldwin’s influences in literature and ideas. It is clear that Baldwin was a voracious reader. But I wish I knew more about that. I also wonder about the very specific question of if he met or read Howard Thurman. There are overlapping ideas there, and I don’t know if Baldwin ever met Thurman or read Jesus and the Disinherited or other books or if they just had some parallel ideas that grew independently. Thurman was a generation older, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had met or read one another.

Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I first read John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars and then read a number of his other books over a couple of years. Then I moved on and I didn’t pick up a Scalzi novel for about six years or so. Last year there was a 2 for 1 sale and I saw one book I wanted and Scalzi’s Starter Villain was essentially free. And a year later I actually picked up Starter Villain on a whim and remembered why I like Scalzi.

He is funny. He takes ideas that have been well done and then gives it a new spin that both stands alone as a story, but also is even better if you know the original. Redshirts was told from the perspective of the crew where the crew knew something was going on and if they went on an away mission they would probably die. Fuzzy Nation  is a spin on Henry Beam Piper’s 1962 Little Fuzzy. Old Man’s War is inspired by Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. There are a number of other books that are original, but it is often the “inspired by” book that are the most funny. And while I like the more serious scifi, I tend to use Scalzi’s funny novels to help break me out of reading slumps.

Kaiju Preservation Society is a covid novel. Jamie Gray left his English PhD program to work in communications for a start up. He gets fired, unfairly, just before covid hits NYC and he spends months working as a food delivery person before being offered a job by someone he knew from his grad program. Jamie is desperate for a job, his friend Tom is desperate to get someone at the last minute because he is leaving on a project and one of his team members has covid.

It is not much of a spoiler (since it is on the book description) that the job that Jamie is being hired to do is not on earth, or at least not on our earth. When humans started using nuclear power, they started opening up portals to alternate dimension of earth. Jamie is going to an earth that evolved Kaiju (Godzilla) as the dominant species. Everything on that version of earth will try to kill you.

As Scalzi says in the author’s note at the end, this is not intended to be a deep novel, it is intended to be a pop song. The plot is fairly predictable, but it is still fun. I alternated between the kindle and the audiobook. Wil Wheaton narrated the audiobook. I like Wheaton’s narration most of the time, but he has a narrow range of narration and if the character’s don’t really fit, he isn’t a great narrator. This one fits okay, but Wheaton does tend to make people a bit more snarky than necessary. One reviewer I read said that Wheaton’s narration always makes him want to punch him. I like Wheaton’s narration most of the time, but I get that impulse.

This is a fun book that I enjoyed and also fluffy in a very good way that we all need sometimes.

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

The Camino is something I will never do. I would love to do it, but it is highly unlikely that I will ever do it. That being said, several people that are in a book group that I am in have done it. A married couple that I knew from college managed a way station for almost two decades. The son of one of my best friends has done it. And I know there are tons of memoirs and other books about it.

I picked up Call of the Camino because I am in a data entry phase of my work and I like to put light fiction on in the background to make the data work more tolerable. The kindle book was on sale and the audiobook was part of the Audible free library for members. So it was a very low cost to entry.

As I started I wasn’t really impressed. The book it telling two stories, at two points in time, simultaneously. This is something that is not new. You find out very quickly that the two stories are of a daughter in the present getting the chance to write a travel story about the Camino. And then the second story is about the daughter’s mother, who died when the daughter was a toddler. The daughter knows her father (who also died when she was in elementary school) and mother met while doing the Camino. There is obviously a pull to the Camino for the daughter. I think the motivation for the mother’s story is a bit far fetched, but once you suspend disbelief about the reason for the mother’s trip the rest is good.

I was surprised that I like this as much as I did. It is a novel of self discovery and light romance while on a trip that is traditionally associated with a spiritual pilgrimage. The novel is respectful of the spiritual pilgrimage, while not being oriented toward faith. I listened to it for two days while working. And then I was fully invested and read about 10 (short) chapters last night before finishing up the story today on audio.

The narration was good. The writing was engaging. The basic outline of the story was predicable, but still fun enough to follow along. Especially if you can pick it up on sale or borrow it from the library, it is an enjoyable read.

Call of the Camino: A Novel by Suzanne Redfearn Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook