Recently, a couple of my friends started an online book club, and Francine Rivers’s classic novel was the first selection.  I was familiar with Rivers’s work before reading the book – during my second year of college, before I came to know Christ, I met a girl who was a Christian who gave me a copy of The Atonement Child to read.  The book, a harrowing novel about a girl who chooses to go through with a pregnancy caused by rape, shook me to my core in its unwavering portrait of this issue.  I typically don’t read Christian fiction because even though it is supposed to adhere to my spiritual beliefs, I’ve never found the writing style particularly compelling.  Typically, the issue of coming to faith IS the plot, rather than having a storyline that evolves organically from the elements of character development, setting, and theme.  Instead, the books often tend to be preachy, and I don’t want that.  I know what I believe.  I just want to get lost in a good story.

Redeeming Love was like that for me.  A retelling of the book of Hosea set in California during the Gold Rush, the story revolves around Angel, a young woman from a severely troubled past.  Sold into prostitution at a young age, Angel grows up believing that beyond using her body as a commodity, she has no worth.  Although she is dressed in fine clothes and given everything by her employers, on the inside she is barren and hopeless.  It isn’t until Michael, a farmer who falls in love with Angel at first sight and feels that God has called him to better her life, comes into her life and takes her away to marry him that Angel’s process of recovery begins.  However, letting go of her past and abandoning her old self concept appears to be a challenge that, without Michael’s unwavering faith in God, is impossible to overcome.  While one weakness is that the story could have easily been shortened due to occasional repetitive action, an even bigger strength is how human the characters are, how relatable and easy to fall in love with.  The novel does retain some elements that bridge into the preachy aspect I mentioned earlier, but I felt that they did not detract from my experience of reading the story.

I think that much like young adult fiction, Christian fiction gets a bad rap because of books that make a conversion or having faith the plot rather than having it be one of many messages a reader can take from it.  It is for this reason – and I fully expect to get lots of “What the heck???” reactions here – that I believe Flannery O’Connor is one of the great writers of religious fiction.  When I first read O’Connor, I was convinced she was an atheist.  Her characters are some of the most faithless and downright reprehensible people in all of literature – they murder, lie, cheat, and swindle everything from money to prosthetic limbs.  They denounce and curse God.  But then, after battling a lupus-like illness for six months and reading about how her own lifelong sickness affected her writing, I learned of her identity as a Christian and how her devotion served as a guiding force throughout her experience.  It is this odd mixture of the knowledge of her imminent death and Catholicism, albeit with a rejection of its ritualism, that creates the dark world of her fiction.

Nonetheless, she explores the issue of faith by creating characters who are the antithesis of those who typically appear in religious fiction – by showing the lack of faith in their lives and how it leads to their downfalls.  And the results, for me as a Christian writer and reader, are stunning.  The Misfit of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” holds a cynical view of Jesus’ sacrifice that contributes to his bitterness, and his compulsion to murder.  Hazel Moates of Wise Blood responds to his loss of home and identity after World War II by turning away from God and establishing “The Church of Christ Without Christ,” which preaches hopelessness and the coming of a new Jesus that embodies this lack of hope – and the results are tragic.  In “Good Country People,” Hulga’s mother’s posturing as a Christian when her judgmental tendencies and selfishness actually go against the faith’s teachings creates a rift between her and her daughter.  Nearly every story she wrote illustrates this theme. True, it’s a subtle message that not all readers are prone to walk away with.  But the impact it’s had on me and my desire to address Christian ideas in my work in ways that are unique is immeasurable.

I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a writer.  I’ve never wanted to be a writer of historical fiction, or a “literary novelist,” or even a Christian novelist.  I want to be Kori E. Frazier – but I also want to acknowledge where my talent as a writer comes from.  And reading Francine Rivers provided an answer for me about what my ultimate purpose as a writer is.  Aside from the story itself, the most powerful part of the book for me was an essay in the back titled “Why I Wrote Enduring Love,” in which Rivers shares the role her Christian faith has played in her writing.  Originally a mass market romance novelist, Rivers put everything on the line as a young writer – including her family and her husband, who once told her, “If you were forced to choose between me and our children and writing, you would choose writing.”  It wasn’t until she joined a local church, and later a Bible study group that inspired Enduring Love, that she realized that her love of writing and her devotion to God could no longer be separate.  “I used to believe the purpose in life was to find happiness,” she writes.  “I don’t believe that anymore.  I believe we are all given gifts from our Father, and that our purpose is to offer them to him […] By the world’s standards, I was successful.  But it was all meaningless vanity. Now I have joy.”