How did I get into this predicament? Oh yeah, I was trying to be helpful.

My friend send me a direct message on Twitter. “Can you help us out,” he asked. “We need some bloggers to write reviews.”

I ambled over and read the blurb for The Muir House and the topics sounded familiar. Only daughter. Mama and Daddy fought like cats and dogs. Daddy died. Now trying to remember her childhood and make sense of her past. Yep, sounds very familiar. And there’s some God stuff in there, too. Oh yeah, sign me up.

I filled out their contact form and thought, “Hey! This will be fun!”

The paperback arrived in the mail and I felt special. An advance copy! I’m reviewing a book! Did I mention that I felt special?

I sat down on my comfy couch the very next afternoon with a nice hot cup of coffee, looking forward to a pleasant afternoon of combining business with pleasure.

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I have an acid test for books. It works like this. For nonfiction, I open at a random page; if it captures my attention and I want to keep reading, I buy it. Novels I treat a little differently–I open on page one and if I find myself lost in the story after a page or two, I’m in.

The Muir House by Mary DeMuth failed my acid test.

I persevered. “Maybe it just gets off on a slow start,” I thought. Um. No.

I tried to withdraw my name from the blogger’s review list. “No can do,” the nice lady wrote back. “But it’ll be a negative review,” I countered. “Write it anyway,” she replied.

Oh. Pooh.

Another afternoon, this time with steely resolve and no coffee. “I can make myself read this book,” I thought. Um. No.

At page 157, I gave up and skipped ahead, reading a few random pages as I went. The end. “I don’t write negative reviews,” I wailed. But I’m stuck. I can’t lie. Can I? Um. No.

###

When I imagined reading The Muir House, I imagined a nice little mystery with some spiritual overtones. I thought that the main character, Willa, might be struggling with some of the same sorts of themes I’ve been through recently: depression, regret, anguish, blame, forgiveness, redemption. The reality of reading The Muir House was nothing like my imagining.

In imagining writing the review for The Muir House, only catty phrases like “limp prose” leapt to mind. The advance reviews were filled with superlatives. Did we really read the same book?

I backtracked to read other bloggers’ reviews. When I got to Joshua Gordon’s post, I paused. I have not read Mary’s memoir, Thin Places, but it’s clear she and I have many things in common, to wit: sexual abuse, traumatic childhoods, deaths of our fathers, and a love of Jesus. Like Mary, I too, pursue a deep relationship with the Father who will never leave me.

My gut feeling is that if Mary had written this novel from that very raw, uncensored place inside herself, this story would have unfolded very differently. Instead of the shallow, superficial treatment we got, we’d have a deep, moving work of fiction that rings with authenticity. I am certain that Mary has a meaningful, mystical experience of God to share with us from her exploration of the “daddy-shaped hole” in her soul. Unfortunately, those experiences didn’t inform writing The Muir House.

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This post is part of a blog tour of Mary DeMuth’s book, The Muir House. The review preceding mine is by Christy Tennant. Tomorrow’s post will appear on Angus Nelson’s site. To find a list of all the blogger participants and read more reviews, go here.