Books in Brief: FICTION (Published 1996)
- ️Sun Mar 31 1996
- March 31, 1996
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THE RAPTURE OF CANAAN By Sheri Reynolds. Putnam, $22.95.
Who is God and how does He reveal Himself? This is the question that torments Ninah Huff, a member of the evangelical Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind. Ninah is the granddaughter of the church's founder and leader, but she is also an adolescent on the edge of adulthood, confused and questioning, unconvinced of her grandfather's righteousness or her own ability to accept the Lord. When she and her prayer partner, James, succumb to their physical impulses one moonless night, Ninah half-persuades herself that they are merely "knowing Jesus through each other." But the discovery that she is pregnant soon triggers a tragedy that splits the community and sets Ninah off on her own lonely path. This central melodrama and its aftermath are a bit too neatly contrived, and Sheri Reynold leaves a curious blank at the heart of her novel by sidestepping the motivations of the church's zealous patriarch. The outlines of the world she draws are vague, and the atmosphere of the cult, for all its emphasis on wrathful punishments, seems oddly benign. Yet Ms. Reynolds's poetic gifts are uncommonly powerful. In "The Rapture of Canaan," she tells a truly rapturous love story and presents two unforgettable characters: the teenage heroine and her skeptical but stalwart grandmother, from whom she learns about the acceptance of loss, the pragmatism that must underlie any abiding love, and the place in every heart where God resides, waiting to reveal Himself. ZOFIA SMARDZ