I’m not a big fan of most Christian fiction. I know that that is cutting a wide swath against the various genres within that group – suspense, mystery, historical, romance etc. – but it’s true. I have read and read and read these authors that everyone swears will be THE ONE to change my mind about this genre. And it hasn’t. I still find them trite, formulaic and usually, pretty poorly written.
Until now.
I read The Church Ladies by Lisa Samson a few years ago at the recommendation of a friend. And I liked it. Didn’t love, but I liked it. Then I read a few more of hers from my library one summer. And suddenly I really liked her.
She had a bit of a gothic and quirky flair to her writing that I loved. But it seemed that she was on a trajectory of sorts throughout her books. Even though they weren’t affiliated with one another, you could see that the themes were consistent, the journey clear. (I have found myself wishing she would write a memoir of sorts…it seems from her books that she must be on a very profound spiritual awakening. Or something. So Lisa, if you read this, WRITE THAT FOR ME PLEASE. Thank you.) Her prose was unsentimental, wry and occasionally ironic. I loved her characters – the crazier, the better. She wrote about situations that were real and yet rarely show up at the Christian book store.
In my opinion, she had guts equivalent to her talent. Which says a lot.
It would probably be easy to just write novels without that thread of theology throughout, without the clarion call to a Church about love and justice and grace. And it made me addicted. Suddenly I had ordered every book she had written from Amazon and Chapters. My favourites kept switching to her latest. Quaker Summer, Embrace Me…
And this is no different. I think that her latest book, The Passion of Mary Margaret, is nothing short of brilliant. It’s brave, well-written, convicting, illuminating and beautiful. The story of love and sacrifice wasn’t formulaic in the least; I was taken by surprise on several occasions, twisted by the story.
The highest praise I can give it is this: With a two and a half year old and a teething-refusing-solids-loving-to-nurse baby, I read this book in a day. I could not put it down. And then when I finished it, I promptly went back to the beginning and read it again.
I read a few reviews that had a hard time with a few aspects of the book such as the coarseness of Jude’s situation. Most of them struggled with Jesus in the book; Mary Margaret talks to him and he returns the favour; she lives in a tangibility of his presence. And oh, I loved it. As a charis-emergent-missional girl, I GET THAT. Oh, it was sweet.
I love reading authors that embrace the mystical. I think that’s part of the reason why I love Claudia Mair Burney’s books so much as well. That deep, wild part of our soul, stretching out towards satisfaction found only in Love.
So. No one asked me to do this review. No one even sent me this one for free. I paid for it. And you should too.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Samson (Quaker Summer) mixes quirky with mysticism, seasons it with social justice, and the result is a page-turner with characters so fresh, funny and indelible the reader wants another 50 pages or so, please. Samson envisions a Jesus even an atheist would enjoy talking to, a Jesus whom the titular Mary-Margaret Fischer, a religious sister, talks to and gets direction from, as mystics quite naturally do. An even more compelling figure than Jesus, or at least someone with more lines and hence more characterization, is Mary-Margaret’s childhood friend, Jude Keller, a ne’er-do-well with a soul needing saving encased in a body so good-looking it’s hard for a body to resist. The required Christian progression to redemption is a natural in this story that slips between past and present—somewhat confusingly at first—and ranges from Maryland to Africa. The plot holds a few surprises that make some of the final, far-flung episodes more narratively and theologically satisfying. Quirk works; this is a deeply engaging book deserving of a broad audience. (Mar.)
