St. Martin's Summer Book

Warning: This book (and this review) discuss rape, pregnancy, and abortion.

Yuck.

I'm tempted to just leave it at that, but my frustration with this book deserves more than a one-word review.

To start, I can't really remember the decision-making process when I chose to read this. I know it fulfilled a category in a reading challenge I was casually participating in, but so would a thousand other books. Maybe I should have known better than to read a Christian novel about rape and pregnancy, but (like, five years ago) I read and loved Redeeming Love by the same author, so I figured I was relatively safe.

Booooo.

This isn't even a real novel. It's three hundred pages of pro-life propaganda. I think what pisses me off most about this fact is that Rivers could have told this story with a protagonist who got pregnant after having sex, but instead she chose to use rape as a means to communicate her agenda. Her storytelling choices were disgusting, insensitive, and manipulative, to say the least. At one point her poor main character explained that being raped wasn't even that bad; it was just physical pain that went away pretty quickly. No, what really hurt her was the way her loved ones tried to pressure her into getting an abortion. Maybe there are real people who feel that way, but it was extremely obvious that Rivers wasn't interested in telling a story about sexual violence and healing. She was only interested in convincing her readers that abortion is the evilest thing on the planet.

I don't really care about her stance on abortion; this review isn't a criticism or a support of her opinion on that topic. But I am completely disgusted by the way she chose to tell her story and express her opinions. Even though I'm a Christian, I almost never read Christian fiction and I think it's going to stay that way for a long time. I feel so sorry for any rape victims who picked this up hoping for encouragement or compassion and instead got a sermon, and not even a very good sermon at that. Even the discussion questions at the end of the book were all about abortion and had nothing to do with sexual violence, so there's no possible excuse to make for the author's agenda. This is a pro-life opinion piece which is so clunky that when it tries to demonize the pro-choice group, even its stereotypes are stereotypes. I'm so sad that Rivers dragged the sensitive topic of rape into this just for cheap manipulation and drama. This book was gross, gross, gross. (Writing an angry review is cathartic, though.)