ŷ������

Didn't quite finish but I cannot keep reading this drivel. I usually don't leave reviews for books I don't finish, but I'm making an exception here because I have strong opinions.

I can forgive a book for bad ideas/theology if it is well-written. I can even forgive inappropriate content if I feel that it is necessary for moving the plot of a well-written story forward. What I cannot forgive in a book is bad writing.

This book gets two stars from me (I almost gave it one) because it is poorly written. It is objectively bad. The story is unbelievable as a whole. The characters are flat, boring, and undeveloped. The allegory is forced and weak. The entire plot pivots around sex which is shallow and annoying. And this book is SO. LONG. The author could have condensed it to 200 pages and it would have been better.

I can understand the appeal, and I think the content itself - as a Christian story - is okay. The allusions to sex are not graphic or gratuitous, though the material is dark. I can understand the message Rivers was trying to communicate and I applaud her for the attempt. But even so, this book would have been so much better if Edith Wharton or Thomas Hardy had written it. Francine Rivers just didn't manage it.

I love Christian fiction. CS Lewis, George MacDonald, JRR Tolkien, Louisa May Alcott, GK Chesterton, Elizabeth Prentiss, John Bunyan - they all wrote such beautiful, morally high stories: Art. This book is not that. I criticize it not because I don't like Christian fiction, but because I don't like it when authors write bad novels, slap some Christian themes and a Christian label on them, and then believers are expected to praise it to the ends of the earth. Nope, won't do it. So this is my harsh but honest review of a badly written novel.

*Note: I don't want to get much into the topic of content because, like I said, I can forgive content. But one major issue I had in this book is the issue of consent in Sarah and Michael's marriage. He expects her to be faithful to him, but she did not want to nor consent to marrying him. The whole premise of the novel falls apart right there, in my opinion. Furthermore, it is so hard to suspend disbelief with a character who glimpses a hot woman and immediately "falls in love with her". I know that the book claims it was a message from God, but this really just sounds like the Christian version of "love at first sight" and it's just as unbelievable as in a secular romance novel or a Hallmark movie.

**Edit to add: I am aware that the novel is loosely based on the Book of Hosea. Francine Rivers made it abundantly clear (her main character is named Michael Hosea for goodness sake and she references the book a thousand times). Just because she based the book off of a bible story does not mean that she did a good job writing this novel. Further, this is not a good retelling of Hosea. Gomer was a "whore" and many scholars believe that she was not a prostitute before she married Hosea, but rather chose to commit adultery after they had married. Hosea then chose to love her again and again in spite of her betrayal. Sarah in the story was sold into prostitution as a child and has suffered immense psychological trauma. She does not want to marry Michael and doesn't consent to the marriage, and when she leaves him it isn't to return to prostitution, but to break free and be on her own for the first time in her life. The allegory is flawed, and Rivers' writing is so poor that there is no way I can overlook it.