Signs and Wonders

Signs and Wonders: A Harmony Novel. Philip Gulley. 2003. HarperCollins. 224 pages. 

The summer Barbara Gardner turned sixteen, she was crowned the Tenderloid Queen by the Lawrence County Pork Producers.

While I enjoyed the first Harmony book very much, I haven't quite been able to appreciate the later books in the series. (The Christmas novella was nice, however.) Signs and Wonders, the fourth book, is the biggest disappointment to me yet. I am finding things that made me laugh out loud in the first book--the 'observations' about how church meetings go--are making me cringe now. Because what I took for light fun in the first book--and even, to a certain degree, in the second book, I now feel is over-the-top mocking. In a condescending, mean-spirited way. To laugh with characters that are quirky are one thing--to make them be 'the joke' five hundred thousand times in a row--is another. The sentimentality lessons which I found more charming than annoying in the first book are now much too much for me to endure. Because I now feel he is pushing an agenda, that he has a message, and if you don't agree with him, well, you'll end up being the next big joke.

I don't know if I'll continue on with the series or not.

© 2011 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews


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