BEWARE OF RAVING LUNATIC (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} faren_maddox) wrote,@ 2007-11-11 10:46:00 |
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| Current mood: | enthralled |
Review of Faith Awakened
I first knew of Grace Bridges through her work for the Lost Genre Guild. She invited me to take a look at the organization that allowed her to blend her passion for well-written speculative fiction and her passion for God, and I was amazed by what a vibrant world it is becoming. She has put so much effort into promoting the work of others, but now she has taken the step of making her own contribution to Christian speculative fiction. Her new book, Faith Awakened, is not only a beautiful story but a testament to the ideals she has long upheld.
Faith Awakened poses a question that I believe is universal: How far do we have to go to find a place that God cannot exist in? While this is the central theme of the book, it is done with subtlety rather than the heavy-handed approach so many Christian authors take. Faith Awakened poses the question, but answers it through the beautifully written lives of Miriam and Faith, two women that seem to have no connection but draw inexorably closer to each other as the story progresses.
Faith’s idyllic childhood comes to a lifetime of spiritual struggles and unanswered questions, while Miriam’s life is a stark portrait of a world gone mad at the brink of its own destruction. The women don’t know one another, have never heard of one another, and live in completely separate societies in times far removed. Yet something about Faith’s journey, one each reader can connect to quite easily, reflects the journey of Miriam as she searches a desolate, rapidly emptying world for a way to survive. Faith travels around our globe in search of an answer to emptiness, while Miriam is busy trying to build a virtual new world so her few companions can survive. The farther they go, the heavier the question weighs: have they finally gone so far that even God cannot follow?
Grace Bridges does in 150 pages what many authors can’t do in 1500 pages. Faith Awakened is a poignant and heartbreaking story about a lonely girl, a thrilling tale of the end of the world as we know it, and the answer to the question of what faith truly means when a person reaches the limit of their understanding. This beautiful new addition to a growing culture of Christian speculative fiction is everything that is best in the genre with none of the pitfalls. An amazing read that ought to be on everything sci-fi lover’s shelf.
