Before I say anything about the above mentioned book, I have confessions to make. I started reading English books at age 14, namely the Enid Blyton blue dragon series (for young readers). Most of what I read before age 21 came from Readers' Digest which I used to buy at jumble sales at 10 cents a copy. One year end holidays of 8 weeks I actually bought and read 138 issues of Readers' Digest. At age 24 I converted to Christianity. Hence by now you might have noticed that majority of the books I reviewed or wrote responses to were probably written by authors who may not be Christians.
A few weeks back I run out of books to read and Elizabeth suggested that I start working on her Christian novels. I was reluctant as I know I cannot in all honesty give glowing reviews. Then Elizabeth commented that as a practicing evangelical blogger, I owe it to my readers to blog about Christian books that parents may want to buy for their children. Well! I can not disagree with what she said. So this is probably the very first blog written about a Christian novel in Ramblingsofadyslexic.
It is usually my habit to write about any book as soon as I have read the last page. However, because this is a series of 4 books, I did not do that. In between reading the first two books I took a trip to Shanghai for a few days. Subsequent to that, I went to Canton for a few days. It took time to finish reading the remaining two books. Before I got my act together to write about them I was unwell for a few days. Now I must be very careful that I do not get too specific as I do not want to be inaccurate. Pardon me if I speak in rather general terms.
Cape Refuge started with the double murder of Morgan and Blair's parents. While it was a very good plot, I personally think that if the author had written the book in half the number of pages, it would have been a better read. There were 380 pages before the Afterword. Suppose we halve it to 190 pages, then there would be less chapters in between Jonathan being detained in the county jail and his release. I was really impatient reading the playing out of daily details in so many pages and extremely short chapters. On page 30 Morgan arrived at the murder site, it was on page 334 that I see the memorial service for the murdered couple. While such a slow moving clean book may appeal to a girl age between 11-15, it took great determination and discipline for me to read line by line from the beginning to the end. Here I must admit that what I am trying to do is to write a fair opinion or personal reaction to the book. In no way will I be able to sit down and write a similar story of equal length.
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