Even Now

I am sad that as a Christian that I am expected to read and accept "Christian Literature" as true art. Just because a person writes a book or makes a movie from a Christian perspective, doesn't automatically make that book or movie good. In fact, I usually find the opposite.

That being said, I just finished the "Even Now Series" by Karen Kingsbury. While the books were entertaining, they weren't exactly well written (I found numerous typos and even noticed the author using the wrong name at one point in the book!).

Even Now is the story of 18 year old Emily Anderson, a freshman at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Emily was raised by her grandparents after her mother, a teenager at the time of Emily's birth, ran away from home in search of Emily's father, whose parents had whisked him away to LA to avoid responsibility for impregnating his young girlfriend.

As Emily uncovers the details of her parent's lives around the time she was born, we start to know more of that story as well. Lauren and Shane and been in love since they were in elementary school. They were both only children and their parents were best friends and business partners. After they found out that Lauren had gotten pregnant, they did everything they could to stay together so that they could get married and raise their baby. But their parents did everything that they could to tear them apart. After Shane is taken to LA, Lauren has the baby and sets out to find him. However, Emily becomes deathly ill and Lauren races back to Illinois to get her the care she needs. Due to a miscommunication with the hospital, Lauren thinks that they have told her that her daughter is dead and so she flees and never comes back. In reality, the hospital got the name mixed up and Emily is very much alive, now left to be raised by her grandparents.

Fast forward 18 years and Shane is a Top-Gun Fighter Pilot stationed in Reno. He served in the Gulf War and is now a Captain in the Navy, in charge of training fighter pilots. Shane has also used his story as a teenager and his constant search for the love of his life to rededicate his life to the Lord.

Lauren, all the while, has become a famed war correspondent for the "liberal" (oooo, it's made to be so evil in this work of Christian fiction. Liberals = bad and never Christian. Christians = good and never liberal.) Time Magazine. She lives and works in Afghanistan where she truly believes that the only way to incite peace is to not have war at all.

You can imagine the peril that ensues as Emily finds both of her parents and reunites them in Illinois just in time for Emily's grandfather, Lauren's father, to lose a battle with cancer.

You know, it's books like this that ever reincite my desire to write Christian fiction. Not because I'm inspired though, but because I feel like Christians deserve to have good literature (and hey, I married a guy that feels that they deserve to have good movies! what a pair!). We shouldn't have to read garbage just because we believe in Jesus. Jesus probably wouldn't have read garbage.

Before you get the impression that I hated this book... stay tuned for my next post in which I bought the sequel :-)