I’ve read Sarah Dunant’s two previous novels about women in the Italian Renaissance — The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan.  Both are good novels, but I found Sacred Hearts brilliant, my favourite of the three by far.

This could be because it’s set in a world that’s always fascinated me: a convent.  In medieval and renaissance times, convents were a lot of things — a dumping ground for unwanted or unmarriageable women; a prison for women who didn’t want to be there, but also a haven where at least some women could experience the freedom to exercise skills (artistic, administrative, or other) that they would have no scope for in the outside world.

Both aspects of convent life are clearly presented in Sacred Hearts, the story of an unwilling teenager, Serafina, sent to the convent after she disgraces herself by falling in love with her music master.  Serafina longs for freedom, a chance to escape and run away with her beloved, but as she slowly and reluctantly becomes part of convent life she becomes much more than a reluctant novice — she becomes a pawn in power games that are being played out within the convent, reflecting even greater power struggles in the world beyond.

The convent of Santa Caterina in Ferrera, though it seems like a prison to Serafina, is in fact a rich and varied world, home to Madonna Chiara, the brilliant abbess who today would be CEO of a multinational corporation; Suora Umiliania, crusader for greater piety; Suora Magdelena, ancient mystic; home to poets and musicians and even actresses; home to Zuana, daughter of a doctor, who came to the convent as a reluctant novice herself years ago after her father’s death but found there, as apothecary sister, opportunities the outside world would not have afforded her. As Zuana observes, she has never heard of a woman outside the convent who owns her own apothecary shop and treats her own patients.

It is Zuana who befriends the angry and rebellious Serafina, and who as a result finds herself forced to make choices and choose sides in the convent’s power struggles.  Santa Caterina, like all convents of its time (1570) is under threat. Outside its walls the Protestant Reformation sweeps across Europe, and in response the Catholic church has launched the counter-Reformation, promising stricter rules and far less freedom for women in religious life.  This threat haunts the novel, hanging in the background, influencing all the women’s choices.

Sacred Hearts is written not only with vivid and exacting detail but with beautifully developed characterization.  For many years I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a novel set in a convent, but at this point I’m laying the idea aside, unless some brilliant new inspiration strikes. It just can’t be done better than this.

The Winterhouse is a jewel of a historical novel, focusing on two rarely-explored threads of Newfoundland heritage. One concerns the Jewish presence in Newfoundland, the other the tradition in some outport communities of spending the harsh winter months in a “tilt” or “winterhouse” in the woods, protected from the more severe weather by the ocean.

These two threads come together in a small, quiet and intensely personal story. It’s the tale of Rosehanna Quint, a teenage girl abandoned after her mother’s death and her father’s hasty remarriage.  Her father, who is the merchant’s agent in their small community, turns over management of the merchant’s store to a newly-arrived European stranger.

The slowly-growing relationship between the quiet, reserved, but resilient Rosehanna and the man she calls “the mister” turns from a chilly marriage of convenience to something much more like friendship when the busy months of summer end and they find themselves in the enforced idleness and closeness of the winterhouses.

This budding relationship forms the plot of this novel — a simple and understated story in which every word and glance takes on significance.  The sense of time and place is so vividly created you can almost smell every smell.  McGrath is a powerful and evocative writer, and this novel deserves to be widely read by everyone who enjoys historical fiction, especially those who like Newfoundland history and want to explore some of the lesser-known corners of our past.

Before I even review this book, I want to tell you about a great contest with a chance to win the book. Go to author Tina Chaulk’s website to find out all about it and enter the contest!

I read this book back when it was a manuscript, and it’s been exciting to see it come to fruition.  It’s a contemporary, down-to-earth story about Jennifer Collins, a young woman who works as a mechanic in the garage her father once owned.  Jennifer’s always been a daddy’s girl, and when her dad dies unexpectedly, her world falls apart.  Her relationship with her mom has always been a little more complicated, and in the aftermath of Jennifer’s complicated grief, she and her mom find themselves farther apart rather than closer together.  As for Jennifer’s relationship with her husband Jamie, that falls apart completely as Jennifer retreats further and further into a private world of loss. The only person she’s comfortable with is her grandmother, confined to a nursing home in the last stages of dementia.  Jennifer finds Nan’s room a refuge, because Nan is so often lost in the past and it’s as if the whole last painful year hasn’t happened.

Jennifer’s struggle becomes even more painful as everyone around her starts moving forward and she stays stuck in the past.  Even worse, she begins peeling back the layers of memory to discover that the past isn’t what she always thought it was, and she’s forced to reconsider everything she believed true about her father and her mother … and herself.

A Few Kinds of Wrong is a gripping a gritty novel about a woman in a man’s world — whose world is falling apart. I think you’ll find it a great read.  Click on over to Tina’s contest and share a story about women in non-traditional jobs if you’d like to win a copy of the book.

I’ve read and reviewed a couple of previous books by Lisa Samson and stand by my conviction that she is one of the best, freshest voices in Christian women’s fiction today.  Quaker Summer is probably my favourite of her books so far. It combines the strong characterization of a novel like The Passion of Mary-Margaret with the concern for Christian social justice found in the book Justice in the Burbs, which Samson co-authored with her husband.

Heather Curridge is the wife of a wealthy doctor and the mother of a sweet and precocious fifteen-year-old boy. Though she loves her husband and son, Heather’s life is empty as she has no career and no strong interests of her own — even her spiritual life and her connection to her church is waning.  She fills her days by compulsively spending her husband’s money on more additions to, and toys for, their luxurious suburban home, and on volunteer duties at her son’s school that have begun to seem petty and pointless.

Heather is ready for a change in her life, and one evidence of that is that she’s been haunted more and more recently by the memories of Gary and Mary Andrews, a couple of poor kids she used to tease and bully back when she was in school. Seeing her own son now as the victim of bullying, Heather regrets what she’s done in the past and wishes she could make amends.  When she and her husband accidentally find themselves on the wrong side of town and run into a feisty little nun running a homeless mission, Lisa begins to suspect God might have a role for her to play there. And a car accident that lands her on the doorstep of two aging Quaker women gives her an opportunity to rethink her life and completes Heather’s transformation.

Transformation isn’t easy — changing your life means not just internal upheaval but discomfort for those around you — sometimes even real danger.  Samson portrays these challenges honestly as Heather faces them, and by the end of the story we see a very different woman from the one we met at the beginning. Heather is no superwoman, but she’s begun the process of following God’s path rather than her own upwardly-mobile one, and the change is unmistakeable. I found this book not just enjoyable but inspiring.

It’s impossible to talk about Lev Grossman’s The Magicians without referencing both Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia (seriously, go look for a review of the book that doesn’t mention either of those two fantasy classics).  But I doubt Grossman would mind, because the parallels are obviously intentional.  Grossman’s main character, Quentin Coldwater, is a brilliant but unhappy New York teenager who grew up reading a series of books about English children who find their way into a magical land called Fillory — an obvious Narnia parallel (though there are echoes here of other children’s fantasy classics, right down to Alice in Wonderland).  Preparing to leave high school for university, Quentin finds himself transported instead to a top-secret school for magicians.

But Brakebills is very far from being an upstate-New-York version of Hogwarts.  Magic is hard work and sometimes boring rather than being charming or picturesque, and the darkly sinister undercurrent of this story comes not from an evil Dark Lord but from the teenage and young-adult magicians themselves, who have all the hangups and personality disorders of unhappy young people everywhere — but who also have the ability to use magic.

Two of Quentin’s deepest secret dreams come true in this  novel — he becomes a magician, and he actually gets to go to a magical land.  Yet he remains throughout the same unhappy, disaffected schmuck he always was — and his friends aren’t much better.  There were a lot of times in the novel I wanted to take Quentin and shake him, but I couldn’t help admit that his reaction to sudden magical powers was probably a lot more realistic than that of Harry Potter and his crowd.  If life itself is not magical, then no amount of magic is going to make it so.

The book is tightly plotted and absolutely engaging, and kept me turning pages to the end.  I can’t say I ever grew to like Quentin as a character, but I did care about his misadventures.  It’s weird to say that a fantasy novel is filled with gritty realism, but this one is, and it’s as bold, innovative and creative a twist on the fantasy genre as you’re likely to read this year.

When I was growing up, Seventh-day Adventist kids’ books were characterized by a kind of didactic earnestness.  Bad deeds were punished, good deeds were rewarded, and lessons were always learned.  Adults and other authority figures were always right and trustworthy.

Times have changed.  Seth Pierce’s new series, The Misadventures of Peter Paul Pappenfuss, features a ten-year-old hero — or perhaps anti-hero — who is not likely to feature in any of Uncle Arthur’s bedtime stories (except maybe as the bad kid who gets his come-uppance in the end).  But Peter Paul is not really a bad kid — he’s a mischievous, troublesome, and painfully honest kid with a good heart.  He’s sometimes bored in school or in church (his dad’s the pastor); he doesn’t like selling chocolate bars to raise money to go to Pathfinder Camporee, and even when he tries to do the right thing, trouble seems to ensue.

The breezy honesty of these books, and the way they’re grounded in everyday reality, makes them refreshing to read and easy for kids to relate to.  But they’re not lacking in spiritual lessons either.  In each story, Peter learns something about God’s will for his life, and the lessons are all the more powerful because they’re not cookie-cutter platitudes.

These were very popular read-aloud books in our house, but 8-12 year olds will also enjoy reading them on their own. I would recommend them to any Christian family with kids in that age group (although they are published by an SDA publishing house, the stories are geared for Christian readers of any denomination).  They will provoke a lot of laughs, but will also help kids think about taking their faith more seriously.  They may even help to remind mischievous little boys that God doesn’t love only the well-behaved little girls like Peter’s “perfect” sister Mary — He loves, and has a place in His plan for, every kid.

I usually issue a disclaimer when I review a friend’s novel, and I’m fortunate to be able to count Seth as a friend. Many years ago, about ten minutes after I met a then-very-young Seth Pierce, he began asking me about being a writer and getting your work published. I encouraged him to keep at it, and I’d love to be able to take some credit for his brilliant career on the basis of that, but I’m pretty sure a writer as talented as Seth doesn’t need anyone to claim credit for his success. I’m not only impressed he wrote books as fresh, funny, and enjoyable as the Peter Paul Pappenfuss books; I’m impressed an Adventist publishing house released them, and I really hope there are more to come. 

First up: great title! Or rather, great subtitle. In a world where many people are exploring connections between different religions while others entrench themselves ever more firmly in their “unique” beliefs, many readers will be curious to know what a “Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian” might have to say about God.

Selmanovic comes by at least three of his religious descriptors honestly: he was born to a secular, non-practicing Muslim family and raised in the aggressively atheist communist worldview of the former Yugoslavia.  As a young man he converted to Christianity – much to his family’s dismay – then moved to the U.S. and spent much of his working career as a Seventh-day Adventist pastor.  He currently lives in New York City, where he works with an interfaith community called Faith House Manhattan.

Throwing “Jewish” into the subtitle reflects not so much Selmanovic’s own life experience as a desire to broaden his message to include all three of the traditional monotheistic religions.  Really, he points out at the beginning, “Muslim, atheist and Jewish” in the title should be read as modifying the “Christian,” since Selmanovic self-identifies as a Christian but argues passionately in this book that Islam, Judaism, Christianity and even atheism have much to teach Christians.

Interedependence, and the humility that allows us to learn from one another, to be served as well as to serve, is the central theme of this book.  As I read it, I could not help carrying on an inner dialogue with the author of the last Christian book I read, Michael Horton of Christless Christianity.  Selmanovic’s vision of God, and of the role of Christians and the Christian church in the world, seems to be one of the very worldviews that Horton is railing against – a syncretistic, “God really loves us all and wants us all to love one another” message that some fear, may blunt the uniqueness of the Christian message and the saving role of Christ.

It’s a fair criticism, though I suspect Selmanovic might feel that it misses the point, that Horton is raising questions he no longer has ap articular interest in asking.  Rather than preserving the “uniqueness” of any religion, either Christianity itself or any Christian denomination, Selmanovic is interested in what binds us together – the messy, flawed reality of human life and the love of God that permeates it, expressed in and through our love for one another.

While I spent most of Christless Christianity inwardly arguing with the author and recoiling emotionally from his message (even at the points where I agreed with it intellectually), I read through It’s Really All About God constantly nodding. I found that what Selmanovic had to say, much of it drawn from his life experience, resonated with my own experience and beliefs.

Of course – to drag Christless Christianity back into this again – Michael Horton would say this is precisely what is wrong with It’s Really All About God.  It resonates with me (and no doubt with many readers) precisely because it feels intituitively right – deep down, we all want to believe we are basically good people beloved by a good God.  The gospel (according to Michael Horton) cuts directly across our intuitive religion with the message that we are condemned sinners who can only be saved through Christ’s death on the cross.

Selmanovic addresses this view of Christian doctrine directly, and the difference in his view and the traditional view represented by Horton really comes down to a difference in how each writer interprets the concept of “grace.” As Selmanovic writes:

Many of us Christians have been insisting that we, with supreme revelation in our possession, are the only heralds and brokers of grace to the world. But as my friend the Reverend Vince Anderson says, grace has been seeping out of all of life, and others have been feasting on it all the same.  We Christians have insisted that our revelation is the only container and only dispenser of grace. the rest of the world, graced from within, has been steadily proving us wrong.  Grace is independent.

Is grace a specialized product, packaged and offered only through traditonal Christianity and available only in  Christian churches, or is it a constant outpouring from God, evident in every corner of human life, as available to the Muslim and the atheist as to the Christian? That’s really the central question, the question Selmanovic answers with a resounding “Yes!”

It’s a powerful message especially for us Seventh-day Adventists, nurtured and trained in a substratum of Christianity that describes ourselves as “the Remnant” possessing “the Truth” – a Truth not only possessed by Christians in opposition to all other world religions, but by Seventh-day Adventists in opposition to all other Christians.

While Michael Horton would argue that the true gospel is recognized as true precisely because it violates our most deeply held beliefs about what it means to be human, Selmanovic argues – over and over, and passionately – that when religions and life clash with each other “life always wins.”  Truth is not absent from the Bible, the Qu’ran, from churches and synagogues and mosques, but when the truths (and Truths) found there violate what we know from our actual lived human experience, life wins. 

This is an exciting and intriguing book, though it leaves many questions unanswered.  Traditonal Christians will want to know what the role of Christ is in this view of God.  Has He been downgraded to merely a great teacher? Is there any point in being a Christian if Christianity is not the “best” and “truest” of earth’s religions? Is Selmanovic’s view of humanity too high and too holy? Does it fail to take into account the reality of a sinful human nature and the real, bitter difficulties of human beings trying to live together despite their differences and falling, again and again, into violence?

This book offers powerful images of the gaps we humans create between ourselves, and the possibility of healing those gaps.  The most vivid stories in the book were the story of Selmanovic’s two weddings (on two consecutive days: a secular ceremony for his atheist family and a religious ceremony with church friends, because neither wanted to share the experience) and the later story of the day his parents finally attended his church.  But the stories of transformation are always on a personal, or, at most, a congregational level: the author suggests no roadmap for how (for example) Muslims and Jews learning to love and learn from each other might look on the ground in Israel and Palestine. 

Again, I’m guessing at what he might say in response to that question, and it might be that the theory has to come first and then be worked out in practice.  But the sad truth is that “life always wins” in another and more bitter sense – our best efforts at community-building and loving one another seem inevitably to fall apart in the face of human selfishness and hate.

I suspect a lot of the questions I was left with after reading this book are questions Selmanovic may not be particularly interested in answering – they belong to a paradigm of religion as (in his words) “a God-management system” – kind of religion that he is no longer interested in. 

Despite the questions – or maybe because of them – I found this a beautiful, often exhilarating, and thought-provoking book, and I would recommend it highly – to Chrisitan, Muslim, Jew or atheist, and maybe even to Hindu, Buddhist or Wiccan (who all get passing mentions in the book, even if they didn’t make the title page).  If this book doesn’t challenge some of your preconceptions about God, faith, and how to reach out to “the other” (or better yet, allow the other to reach out to you) … then I’ll be very surprised.  It’s well worth your time, and will linger with you long after you finish reading it.

Michael Horton has a simple thesis: American Christianity has lost sight of Christ, and is selling a product that bears little resemblance to historic, Christ-centred Christianity. 

It’s a thesis a lot of people, from many corners of the Christian world, would agree with.  He argues that most of American Christianity has been colonized by American culture, and rather than transforming the world, has been transformed by it.  Again, a lot of us would agree. 

 So far, his thesis seems to resonate with some of the conclusions Nadia Bolz-Weber reached in her twenty-four hours of viewing Christian television (Salvation on the Small Screen): the name of Jesus was rarely mentioned except as a talisman, and little reference to His life, teachings, or death made it into the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s 24 hours of exhortation to a fuller, better, more properous and successful Christian life.

 Having just read Bolz-Weber’s book and enjoyed it, I was thinking of that when I began Christless Christianity, and nodding along in agreement with the author’s condemnation of American Christianity.  But this author was about to take me into different territory, and not necessarily territory I was comfortable navigating. 

Yes, he takes potshots at the easy targets, like Joel Osteen with his smooth-talking success mantras and other TV preachers whose “prosperity gospel” agenda is even more blatant.  But he directs his attacks at the Christian left as much as at the Christian right – emergent church leaders such as Brian McLaren come in for some of Horton’s criticism too, for promoting a social gospel that does not have the cross of Christ firmly at its centre.

Horton’s argument is that Christian teachers as diverse as Brian McLaren, Joel Osteen, old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone evangelists, and most everyone else in the American church, are all preaching a gospel based on the our intuitive assumption that human beings are essentially good and just need a little improvement. He says that American churches and preachers in the last century have been in the business of offering good advice from God’s word, keys to success or exhortations to do a little better at representing Jesus in this world.

Whether the particular type of “good” these churches are selling is social justice, personal wealth and success, or abstinence from sex-and-drugs-and-rock’n’roll, Horton argues that all these diverse messages are really the same old heresy – salvation by works.  Different churches may define “sin” and “goodness” differently, but they are all selling the message that with the right kind of effort and motivation, we basically good people can refrain from sin and do a little better.  And where, he asks, is the gospel of Christ in all this?

When we get down to the gospel that Horton believes we should be preaching – the missing “Christ” in the Christless Christianity he castigates – it turns out to be a fairly narrow and specific version of Christ.  It is not just Christian, not just Protestant, but a specifically Calvinist vision of Christ’s work and ministry, one that depends on a belief in total human depravity and a belief in the doctrine of penal subsitutionary atonement. That is, the belief that what Jesus was doing on the cross was accepting the punishment of a wrathful God who really, really hates sin and can’t stand to be in the presence of sinners, and bringing God’s grace (not to everyone, but to the elect, though Horton doesn’t harp on that, perhaps because he’d lose readers who are not strict Calvinists at that point) to people who could never do a thing to save themselves, not even freely accept His free gift.

That’s standard Christian doctrine for many denominations, and Horton’s basic argument is that even though many Chrisitans think that’s what they believe, it’s not what they’re actually teaching.  He’s doubtless right about that.  But he ignores the fact that there are many other ways to have “Christ” at the centre of Christianity, depending upon who you believe Jesus was and what the main point of His ministry was.  The penal substitutionary atonement model, in which the only really important thing Jesus did here on earth was die for our sins, is certainly one way of understandding his ministry, but it’s not the only way.  Churches and Christians who see and celebrate different facets of Jesus’ life may feel that their ministry is still “Christ-centred” – but Michael Horton wouldn’t agree with them.

The author also goes beyond theology to ecclesiology, criticzing the way many churches “do church” and laying out his pattern for how it should be done.  He is scathingly critical of “seeker-driven” churches, as you might imagine, but is also critical of any church that tries to involve its members in ministry in any significant way .  His ideal model of church is one with a very top-down hierarchical structure in which the pastor is there to be a shepherd and the congregation are sheep to be fed, and they are to show up once a week on Sunday morning for a very traditional service, heavy on preaching (always a gospel-centred sermon) but not neglecting the sacraments either. Then everyone should go their separate ways for the rest of the week to live out their Christian lives unburdened by any sort of church activities or minsitries. 

Horton makes a valiant but entirely unconvincing effort to connect this ecclesiology to his theology and argue that the right focus on the gospel will naturally produce this kind of church, but I thought this was by far the weakest part of his argument. He seemed simply to be taking the kind of church model that he personally finds comfortable and valuable, and setting it up as a model of righteousness.

This book provoked, angered, disturbed and troubled me – which is good.  I disagreed with a lot of what Michael Horton said, and reflected several times that it really takes a good old-fashioned Calvinist to make the doctrine of God’s grace sound like something narrow and angry.  I also learned some thing from what he said, and was forced to reflect on how “Christ-centred” my own life, my own preaaching on the rare occasions when I do preach, my writing and my service for God, really is.  I appreciated his pointing out that the message that “all we need to do is love one another” is, in its way, every bit as legalistic and graceless as good old-fashioned legalism, because it still relies on what WE have to do, and assumes we can do that with just a little nudge and a push in the right direction.

I love grace.  I adore the doctrine of God’s grace, and love opportunities to be reminded of it and to remind others of it.  But I am increasingly uncomfortable with attempts to channel the mighty river of grace into a very narrow pipe – to say that God’s grace was demonstrated once only, thorugh this single event, which can be understood and interpreted in only this single way, and is available only to a certain group of people.  Grace doesn’t feel like that to me, and while you can argue that’s what the Bible teaches, it’s actually only one of many teachings about grace, and what Jesus came to do, that you can find in the New Testament.

So Michael Horton may be right with his diagnosis – that large swathes of American Christianity have lost the centrality of Jesus to their message – but I am less convinced that his prescription is correct.  Still, I’m glad to have been shaken up and challenged a bit by this book, and forced to question some of my own preconceptions.  It’s worth reading even if you end up disagreeing.

OK, I write Biblical historical fiction.  And in fact, Terri Fivash and I have the same publisher.  But Terri Fivash makes me feel like an absolute amateur in our common field. Dahveed is my favourite of her three books so far.

Fivash does the kind of hard-core historical research that makes you feel like she has a time machine and has gone back and lived in Israel, circa 1000 BCE.  She’s taken classes in Blbical Hebrew, for crying out loud – and it shows.  But not in the bad way, the “Look at my research!” way.  She’s created a great story with believable characters in a fully realized world that seems real because of the groundwork she’s done. 

King David is a complex character even in the Bible itself, never mind all the various interpretations that have been attached to him over the centuries.  Fivash manages to make the young David likable, flawed, but a strong enough character to carry the weight of destiny that’s being placed on his shoulders.

Even more compelling, perhaps, are the characters of King Shaul and his son Jonathan. The Biblical stories in which they feature are fleshed out into a well-rounded portrait of life in a royal family that’s barely royal and well aware of their precarious status – more like war chieftains trying to figure out what kingship might mean.

Fivash’s portrait of Israel at this time in its history is far more realistic, historically, than many of the Bible-story images we have.  It was by no means a united and cohesive nation; the tribes and their “heathen” neighbours lived side by side in a complicated world where alliances – to other people, as well as to gods – were constantly shifting, and honour was the most important value.

Fivash also shows a refreshingly realistic attitude towards her Biblical source material – never departing from it in any shocking or iconoclastic ways, but recognizing that the Bible is a human document as well as God’s word.  She chooses, for example, to rely on an early manuscript of 1 Samuel that gives Goliath’s height as being closer to seven feet rather than the traditional nine, on the grounds that seven feet is much more believable and later scribes probably exaggerated his height to make David’s accomplishment more impressive.  Her meticulous research, exhaustive knowledge of her subject matter, and excellent characterization make this a novel not to be missed.  It’s the first of a planned series on David, and I’m looking forward eagerly to the rest.

This book looked so promising. A young Lebanese-Canadian girl, Aline, is living the life her parents have always dreamed of for her – a successful college graduate with a job in a big accounting firm, in a steady relationship with a nice, reliable fellow accountant. 

Sure, Aline is a little rebellious on the side – she’s not a perfect Muslim girl, since she drinks and has sex with her boyfriend, and her boyfriend is Anglo-Canadian rather than Lebanese, but she’s doing a pretty good job of meeting the expectations of an immigrant family who only want the best for their little girl.

The problem is, Aline hates her job and is so bored in her relationship with Brian that she freezes in terror when he asks her to marry him.  As she’s still reeling from that blow, things start to fall apart at work, and Aline takes off with her two best girlfriends, Sophie and Yazmin, on a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Cuba that forces her to confront her worst fears, her true desires, and possibilities she’s never imagined before.

As I said, it’s all great in theory, but in execution the book falls far too often into chicklit cliches, particularly an obsession with fashion and brand-names.  This is explained as Aline’s true passion – fashion versus accountancy – but it has the effect of making a potentially interesting heroine come off sounding just as shallow and materialistic as – well, as the heroines of chicklit novels stereotypically do. Does anyone really own forty-six pairs of stilletto heels? REALLY? Also, the writing is a little sloppy in places, producing sentences like “My stomach churned nauseatedly,” which, frankly, is just careless.

Despite its flaws, there’s a charm and appeal to Aline and her story that kept me reading till the happy ending.  Still, the possibilities of Aline’s story and the Muslim-immigrant-family-making-it-in-Montreal background that made me feel the novel could have been so much better than it was.  I wanted more depth, with fewer stillettos and adverbs.  But perhaps this is another case of me critcizing a piece of genre fiction for following the conventions of the genre; maybe I shouldn’t be reading chicklit.