48-Hour Book Challenge – July 2023 – Finish Line Post

48-Hour Book Challenge 2

Ah, it always happens when I wind up a 48-Hour Book Challenge. As usual, I learn that 48 hours isn’t all that long.

And because I didn’t set my alarm, I slept late, and in the afternoon, doing lots of reading makes me sleepy, so I took naps, too. But any time is better than no time, right? And I definitely got more reading done than on an ordinary weekend.

Here are my stats:

Total time spent on the 48-Hour Book Challenge from 8:30 pm Thursday to 8:30 pm Saturday: 24 hours, 40 minutes.

First, the non-reading:
Emailing (I decided to allow that, for reasons): 1 hour, 50 minutes
Spreadsheets and housekeeping: 1 hour
Blogging: 1 hour, 10 minutes
Reviewing: 25 minutes
Posting: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Total non-reading time: 6 hours, 15 minutes

Reading time:
Reading Morris-eligible books: 8 hours, 20 minutes
Reading other books: 5 hours, 5 minutes
Listening to a Morris-eligible book: 5 hours
Total Reading time: 18 hours, 25 minutes.

Okay, that’s a good amount of time….

Total pages read was 1255 (not counting the audiobook).
Total words written (blogs and reviews, but not emails) was 1257.

Books finished: 6
Reviews written: 2
Complete books read: 4
Partial books read: 10
(Explanation: I tend to read nonfiction a chapter at a time. I also have a half-dozen books I read in daily for my devotional time.)

Unfortunately, of the 4 books I finished today, I haven’t written any reviews yet, so that still needs to happen.

All in all, it was a lovely use of my time, but makes me want to spend more time at it!

And the good part is that since I started keeping track of time I’m spending on Morris reading, my total for the week is twice as big as any other week. So that makes it time well-spent.

Until next time….

Review of The Lost Year, by Katherine Marsh

Audiobooks, Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 2

The Lost Year

by Katherine Marsh
read by Anna Fikhman, Christopher Gebauer, and Jesse Vilinsky

Macmillan Young Listeners, 2023. 9 hours, 5 minutes.
Review written July 9, 2023, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This book begins with Matthew, a boy bored at home during the start of the Covid pandemic. His 100-year-old great-grandmother, Gee-Gee, has come to stay with him and his mother, so they are being extra careful to keep the virus away.

Yes, that’s a slow start. But when Matthew’s mother takes away his video games and assigns him to help Gee-Gee go through boxes, he uncovers the stories of two other girls from 1933. And an old picture of two little girls makes Gee-Gee start crying — because she says there should have been three girls.

And what unfolds is a story of Ukraine during the Holodomor — a famine during which millions of Ukrainians died. We get this story from the perspective of Mila, whose father is a high-ranking Communist party member, and from Helen — a Ukrainian girl living in America.

Mila lives a life of privilege, believing that Papa Stalin and her own Papa will take care of her. And believes the stories her father tells her that any problems are caused by the dirty peasants in the countryside who refuse to collectivize their farms. So when a malnourished girl shows up at their doorstep claiming to be her cousin who says her whole family starved to death, Mila doesn’t want to believe her.

Meanwhile, in class in America, Helen’s teacher reads an article from the New York Times from a correspondent in Moscow saying that no one is starving in Ukraine. But Helen’s family has gotten a letter from their Ukrainian cousin begging for help, and she knows other Ukrainian American families who have received similar letters. So she collects stories and writes to the Times, but they tell her she needs first-hand accounts. That her reporting isn’t good enough.

Of course, one of these three girls is Gee-Gee, and we also know that one of the three is not going to make it to America. The book snowballs in tension as it progresses, telling the gripping story of a tragedy the Soviet Union covered up for decades, one that readers won’t know much about. (I certainly didn’t.) It’s unfortunate how timely it is, as the author had this book written before the attack on Ukraine brought the country back into the headlines. I hope that will lead more kids to pick up this book.

katherinemarsh.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/lost_year.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of The Minus-One Club, by Kekla Magoon

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Minus-One Club

by Kekla Magoon
read by Dion Graham

Recorded Books, 2023. 7 hours, 7 minutes.
Review written July 11, 2023, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

The Minus-One Club is a book about grief, about bullying, and about coming out.

It begins with grief. Fifteen-year-old Kermit’s older sister Sheila, who had gone off to her first year of college, recently died in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. When Kermit finally manages to make it back to school, he gets invited to the “Minus-One Club,” a secret group of fellow students who all lost someone close to them. The club members are all there for one another, but they don’t talk about those deaths.

Also in the club is the guy Kermit’s long had a crush on. Matt is the only gay person in their high school who’s out. Kermit is very much not out, but as he starts doing things with Matt, they very clearly fall in love with each other. And since Kermit’s parents are happy he’s doing things with friends again, he can spend the night at Matt’s — as long as he doesn’t miss church in the morning.

Kermit used to be as involved in church youth group as you can get. But since Sheila’s death, he’s full of questions — and it’s all magnified by the way his parents and youth group leaders talk about how gay people are sinning. He knows it’s not safe to come out to them.

And as time goes on, Kermit starts to think Matt isn’t perhaps as happy and well-adjusted as he has always appeared. Navigating all of this makes a compelling story, which does end on a hopeful note.

I do appreciate that being Black was not one of the difficult issues Kermit was navigating. I’m sad that coming out to Christian parents was a big issue. And I have to admit that it’s still going to be an issue for many LGBTQ teens. I like that Matt told Kermit about the church he used to attend (before his mother died) that was fully accepting of LGBTQ folks — so it was correctly not presented as something every Christian church will be against.

This audiobook was compelling, and I found reasons to be able to keep listening. I may have spent a little more time on a jigsaw puzzle in order to finish the book.

keklamagoon.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/minus_one_club.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

48-Hour Book Challenge July 2023 – Starting Line

48-Hour Book Challenge 4

I’m doing it! I took tomorrow off work, and I’m starting a 48-Hour Book Challenge.

These challenges were started many years ago by Pam Coughlan, then blogging as Mother Reader. (And I’m happy to say that although Pam is no longer blogging, she’s finished her Master’s in Library Science and is doing an awesome job working in libraries, still bringing great books to kids.)

Pam was way more organized than me about it. She organized it as a group effort. She got people to donate prizes. She added a little competition. The question to answer: In one 48-Hour period, how much time can you spend reading or blogging?

I am not very motivated about organizing large groups of people. But I really enjoyed the 48-Hour Book Challenges I participated in. They allow me to completely silence that voice inside me telling me I need to be productive and shouldn’t be reading.

Well, now I’m on the Morris Award committee – trying to help choose the best debut young adult book of the year. And it’s much much less that’s eligible than reading for the Newbery — but there’s still more reading than I could possibly do in a year, and I still need to read as much as I possibly can — and I feel like I’m getting behind.

At the same time, I recently made a list of tasks of things I want to polish up on my website. But who has time?

Another contribution is that recently I saw a weekend retreat I was very tempted to attend, but decided I shouldn’t spend that much money until I’ve finished paying for my last vacation. But the idea of taking a long weekend got into my head.

So — I asked for a Friday off, and I’m going to do a 48-Hour Book Challenge.

I make up my own rules. I’m not going to go crazy and set an alarm and cut into my sleep or anything. I plan to go for a walk both mornings and take showers. But I do think I’ll listen to an audiobook while preparing food and doing laundry.

But I’m going to spend as much time as I can with three things:
Reading
Writing Reviews
Working on my Website

And “Working on my website” counts posting reviews and blog posts (like this), but also any of the tasks I listed recently to make the website look better or work better.

So! I started tonight (Thursday) at 8:30 pm. I will continue until Saturday at 8:30 pm and see how many hours I can put in, and if I can get any more Morris-eligible books read.

With these starting line posts, I do like to post this theme song for my declared Reading Time:

And hey, I know I didn’t post this with any notice – but if anyone wants to join me, post in the comments!

Review of To Boldly Go, by Angela Dalton, illustrated by Lauren Semmer

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

To Boldly Go

How Nichelle Nichols and Star Trek Helped Advance Civil Rights

by Angela Dalton
illustrated by Lauren Semmer

Harper, 2023. 40 pages.
Review written March 14, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

This is a simple picture book biography of Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek television series.

The book tells more about her life, including that she danced ballet when she was younger and faced racial discrimination. She also sang and toured with Duke Ellington when she was sixteen.

But the focus of this book is on the inspiration she brought to Black families by appearing on screen on equal footing with other crew members of the Starship Enterprise.

Nichelle Nichols did face discrimination in Hollywood when she worked on the show. They didn’t give her her fan mail and they cut many of her lines. She was ready to quit when she met an important fan — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He encouraged her to keep on.

“You have opened a door that must not be allowed to close,” he said. “Don’t you see that you’re not just a role model for Black children? You’re important for people who don’t look like us. For the first time, the world sees us as we should be seen, as equals, as intelligent people.”

The book does rest heavily on that one incident, but it ends up being a story that children will readily understand. There’s a bonus in the back matter as we learn that Nichelle helped recruit minorities and women to NASA.

There was one thing that struck me as odd. In all the pictures from Star Trek, instead of the distinctive Star Trek vaguely A-shaped logo, the actors were wearing a star and crescent moon. At first, I thought the illustrator simply got it wrong, but now I suspect that maybe they were not able to get permission to use the logo.

angeladalton.com
laurensemmer.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/to_boldly_go.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Zero Days, by Ruth Ware

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

Zero Days

by Ruth Ware
read by Imogen Church

Simon & Schuster Audio, 2023. 14 hours, 10 minutes.
Review written July 17, 2023, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Okay, if you like thrillers at all, this is one of the best I’ve read. I started finding excuses to keep listening to the audiobook (which I usually do while doing chores) because I was completely invested in the story.

It begins with a young woman named Jack breaking into a large office building. And it takes subtlety, strength, planning, and attention to detail. I found myself hoping it was like the beginning of the Scarlett & Browne books, showing a successful heist to start off, so that we’d understand how capable our main characters are. Because it was super tense, and I was already afraid she was going to get caught.

Speaking to her through her earpiece, helping direct her movements and evade security, was her husband Gabe. They clearly have a great working relationship and deep fondness for one another, with a little flirting along with the danger. I found myself thinking that it’s very unusual for a main character to be in a great marriage right at the start of the book. I had a bad feeling that situation wouldn’t last.

I won’t even tell you how those gut feelings were fulfilled or not fulfilled. If you read a description you’ll find out, because it’s the very beginning — but I did enjoy the suspense right from the start.

What I will tell you is that Jack ends up being on the run from the police while trying to solve a mystery — and pretty much everything is against her and she doesn’t know whom she can trust.

And she’s a character I couldn’t help but admire, incredibly good at tight situations, so I was invested in her making it, but not at all sure how or if she would. The tension doesn’t ever let up.

I have to say that Imogen Church is the perfect narrator for a young British woman in a tense situation. I’ve listened to quite a few of her audiobooks by now and she adds to my enjoyment. I’d had the audio sped up with the previous audiobook I’d listened to, and had to slow it back down to normal, because she speaks quickly and keeps the tension going.

I’m currently on the Morris Award Committee for YA debut novels, so only have time to “read” novels for adults in audio form, and the only problem with this thriller is it made me want to spend all my time with it, not reading the award-eligible books I needed to read. So good! Give it a try!

ruthware.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/zero_days.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Edward Lorenz and the Chaotic Butterflies, by Robert Black

Biography, Mathematical, Teen Nonfiction 0

Edward Lorenz and the Chaotic Butterflies

by Robert Black

Royal Fireworks Press, 2022. 127 pages.
Review written January 8, 2022, from my own copy.

Edward Lorenz and the Chaotic Butterflies is a short but thorough biography of one of the founders of Chaos Theory.

Edward Lorenz got interested in meteorology because that happened to be where the U.S. War Department could use his mathematical skills when World War I started.

The book explains how the science of meteorology was developing as computers were developing. And when they tried to model the math of weather forecasting, it was so complex that those two things went together. In fact, because Edward Lorenz had a desk-sized computer in his office at M.I.T., he was able to notice things that other researchers had a harder time studying.

They talk about his initial discovery. He wanted the computer to repeat some calculations but go farther, so he started by typing in the results from already-calculated numbers. But the results the second time through were completely different. He realized that was due to a rounding error — he hadn’t printed out all decimal places of the solutions, so he was actually starting with slightly different numbers.

But why did slightly different starting numbers make a huge difference in results?

I like the way the book describes the equations he used as both unpredictable and stable. The equations are relatively simple, but the results vary wildly. The book even shows how you can do the same thing with a home computer (much smaller than a desk) and an Excel spreadsheet.

I did gloss over some of the equations, but I got the idea of how it all works, and I think students can do the same as me or dive in deeper if they want to know more.

A quick biography of a notable mathematician who started a whole new field of study and showed that not all of reality is linear and predictable.

rfwp.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teen_Nonfiction/edward_lorenz.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of How to Count to ONE, written by Caspar Salmon, illustrated by Matt Hunt

Delightfully Silly, Mathematical, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 2

How to Count to ONE

(And Don’t Even THINK about Bigger Numbers!)

written by Caspar Salmon
illustrated by Matt Hunt

Nosy Crow, 2023. First published in the United Kingdom in 2022. 32 pages.
Review written July 11, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

How to Count to ONE is one of those interactive picture books that speaks directly to the child reader, and this one is all about subverting expectations of counting books.

It starts with a picture of an apple, and asks the reader to count it.

Then it says, “Now for something bigger . . .” and gives them an elephant to count!

Next you think, “Ah, here’s more to count!” because the spread is filled with two giant whales. But instead, the narrator asks:

How many SAUSAGES do you see?

[There’s one, floating on top of the spout of a whale.]

And that’s how things go, with pictures of more and more things — but at least one object in the picture there’s only one of — and that’s what the reader is asked to count.

It’s amazing how difficult it is to only count the one thing. And the narration plays off that. Here’s one example spread:

So, here we have . . . some rhinos,
a few baboons, a number of snakes,
several ants and butterflies,
and ONE giraffe.

Using your counting skills, please count the giraffe.

I hope you didn’t count the other animals.
Remember, this book is about counting to ONE!

Finally, the narrator accidentally asks the reader to count the goldfish, instead of the goldfish that is wearing glasses — leading the reader to say “Two.” See, even the narrator makes mistakes!

But it all ends with the narrator thinking maybe you’re better at counting than they thought, so the reader is presented with one prize to count.

And if they’re just dying to count higher by this time, the endpapers show one hundred things to count.

I love about this book that some children won’t be able to resist counting things and other children will start looking to spot what there is one of. And it’s all in a playful package for plenty of laughter — while counting.

nosycrow.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Picture_Books/how_to_count_to_one.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Beware AI-produced Children’s Books!

Selection Adventures 20

For a year now, I’ve had my dream job – selecting children’s and young adult books for a large public library system with 22 branches.

I think I do a good job balancing critical reviews with popularity and patron requests and the need for a broad collection.

One day, someone requested that we get more books for kids about pets that weren’t only about dogs and cats. That’s something we can always use, but there’s not a lot published. So I looked in our vendor database.

Some titles we already had. Some were quite a few years old. Many were not in stock with our vendor. But I found some books that looked promising.

One book I ordered was called Rabbits: Children’s Animal Fact Book, by publisher Bold Kids. It didn’t have any reviews, and it was only available in paperback. But paperback meant it wasn’t too expensive, and a fact book about rabbits was what I needed, after all. How bad could it be? I put it on my order.

I completely forgot about it. Sometimes when I order short nonfiction books, I’m not sure if it belongs with the children’s nonfiction or with the picture books, and then I put a note on the book – Show to Sondy – to figure out where it belongs when I have the book in front of me. But this book was clearly nonfiction, so it could make it to the library shelves with no more input from me.

A few weeks later, I got a somewhat incoherent note from a cataloger about this book. While I was looking over the record and trying to form an answer, she came to my cubicle almost speechless and showed me this book, along with another: Northern Lights: A Book Filled with Facts for Children, also by Bold Kids.

Reader, when I looked at those books, I was filled with deep shame for having selected them. But wait! I discovered that one of our other selectors had ordered the Northern Lights book, so I felt a lot better that I wasn’t the only one who fell for them.

Let me explain.

The book starts out extremely repetitive and very poorly worded. There’s no logical progression between sentences, and some sentences repeat on later pages, except often with contradictory information or in a slightly different form. It’s got stock photo images and clip art text pages.

Here’s the page that first convinced me we couldn’t put these books on library shelves:

A rabbit has a male and female counterpart. A male rabbit is called a buck. The two types of rabbits have different characteristics. A doe is a baby rabbit, while a buck is a mother. All types of rabbits live underground, except for the cottontail, and their habitats are often called warrens.

Later, I read on. One spread has the same exact text on two facing pages. But the place where it got so bad it’s hilarious was the final spread:

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of feeding a rabbit, you’ve probably wondered how they reproduce. The answer is simple: they live in the wild! Despite being cute and cutesy, rabbits are also very smart.

They can even make their own clothes, and they can even walk around. And they’re not only adorable, but they’re also very useful to us as pets and can help you out with gardening.

[Don’t you wonder how animals reproduce when you feed them? And now you know how to improve your garden – just get a rabbit to help you! I’m thinking they put public domain Beatrix Potter books into the A.I.?]

Northern Lights was equally bad, though not quite as laugh-out-loud funny. Except maybe the spread that says twice that Northern Lights can be seen in Florida. Or the part that says you can hear the sounds they make. “The sound of the lights is like a rainbow.”

I wasn’t completely convinced that Artificial Intelligence would do such a bad job of “writing” a children’s book. But I tweeted about this book. The outstanding author of math books for children, Christopher Danielson, responded. We had a very amusing conversation about it, and he asked Chat GPT to write a couple of children’s books. The quality was very similar to these, so now I’m convinced.

But when I looked at our vendor’s website, Bold Kids has more than 500 children’s nonfiction titles. With one notable title being Sheeps: Children’s Book Filled With Facts (full credit to Christopher Danielson for spotting that one). What should have been a giveaway is that they are non-returnable, which is code for Print-on-Demand. So this “publisher” isn’t really investing money into making the books, just had AI produce the texts and didn’t check. They get printed when someone purchases one.

Let me note that while our vendor Ingram carries more than 500 of the Bold Kids titles, as does our ebook platform Overdrive, another vendor Baker & Taylor doesn’t carry any of them. (Good for them!) But Amazon carries them, as do many other websites selling books to the general public. So this is a general warning to beware.

Of course, this means that in the future I won’t purchase any more books from Bold Kids. But I also am going to be more wary than ever of books that don’t have professional reviews. I was already leery of self-published books, and this example has not helped at all. A friend who’s a writer told me that many publishers and agents are closing submissions because of a flood of AI-generated manuscripts.

And another problem is that partly these are bad because they were trained on what’s out there on the internet. (I assume.) Published authors are wise to be wary of publishers wanting to train AI on their writing.

In the meantime, I offer my experience as a cautionary tale for your amusement. Artificial Intelligence is not yet capable of writing good children’s books, anyway.

Oh, and one final note. I was trying to decide what category to file this post under, and I decided it’s time for a new one, which I’ll call Selection Adventures. I thought it could cover things from my Selector job — but also my experiences on various award selection committees. When I was on the Newbery Selection Committee, I posted about the experience. But I’m currently on the Morris Award Committee to find the best Young Adult Debut book of 2023, and the Mathical Book Prize selection committee, and a CYBILS Award category chair, and a member of Capitol Choices — and I should write up some posts about them. (Award selection is so much fun!) So that’s the new category, and I’m hoping to add to it in the future.

Review of Razing Hell, by Sharon L. Baker

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Razing Hell

Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught about God’s Wrath and Judgment

by Sharon L. Baker

Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 222 pages.
Review written July 3, 2023, from my own copy, ordered via amazon.com
Starred Review

For decades now, I’ve been collecting books on universalism. Razing Hell is a lovely example. The book is focused primarily on rethinking our views of hell, by looking at what the Bible says about it in the original languages, and checking how it matches the strong Bible message of a God of love.

I like Dr. Baker’s approach, because although she’s coming at it from deep scholarship (as evidenced by the list of sources in the Appendix), she makes the book accessible and uses the questions of actual students she’s known to elucidate these views. I also liked that she goes beyond presenting a new view of hell to talk about the aspects of theology that would affect, such as retributive vs. restorative justice and the purpose of the atonement. It’s all presented in a readable and accessible way, with the Appendix loaded full of references, both Scriptural and academic.

She presents a view of hell I found familiar from George MacDonald’s writings: She builds off the idea that God is a consuming fire. And then suggests that this fire is love — that will burn away what is evil — so will be painful for those who hold onto evil. She even imagined part of the pain of judgment may be an offender being confronted by the pain of all those they had hurt. She isn’t saying this image is necessarily exactly how things will go, but she does present a solid case that the purpose of hell is restorative justice, not retributive justice.

One small point that I don’t remember seeing in other books on universalism is that in the Bible, justice and violence are often presented as opposites:

First, in the biblical texts, justice is often opposed to violence. In Isaiah 5:7, God “expected justice [from Israel], but saw bloodshed” instead (NRSV). Isaiah 59:3-4 begins with the violent, wicked actions of the people, stating that “your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue utters wickedness. No one brings suit justly, no one goes to law honestly” (NRSV). Because of these unjust, violent actions “justice is far from [them]” (59:9). If we compare that passage to Isaiah 16:4-5, it indicates that once oppression and violence are gone, justice is established. From these verses we see that justice and violence have nothing in common. In other words, where there’s violence, justice is absent. We may even be able to say that justice and violence stand as opposites so that one cancels out the other. The absence of justice in acts of violence begs this question: If justice is not present in violence, how then can we conceive of a God who executes justice through violence, especially the eternal violence of hell as we have traditionally thought it?

She talks about how forgiveness fits into this picture of justice:

Reconciling justice is also transformational justice. It pierces the darkness of retributive violence with the grace of God and the message of peace through love, forgiveness, and reconciliation. to do justice is to love; to do justice is to forgive; to do justice is to reconcile; this is a chain reaction in which love forgives, forgiveness reconciles, and reconciliation restores — all characteristics of divine justice, God’s reconciling justice.

And here’s a crucial question that years ago got me started along the path of universalism:

But does the defeat of sin within the person take place only in the temporal realm, within time itself, while we live in this body? Why should it? If we are beings who live on after death, like the Bible seems to say, what makes us think that God limits the bestowing of eternal grace to one time period? Why can’t God extend the offer of grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation through Jesus even at judgment — when all will be laid bare, when all persons will see the extent of their sin and the extravagance of God’s love?

And later on, she asks similar questions, after referring to the parable of the workers in the field (where those who labored one hour got the same wages as those who worked all day, who were angry about it):

If God desires to continue the work of reconciliation up to the last second, how can we protest? A sermon I heard as a new Christian put forth one of my favorite images of God as a God of second chances, a God who never gives up on us, who pursues us like a hound of heaven, always offering opportunities for repentance and reconciliation. Why wouldn’t God offer that same invitation on that final day? Why would God’s work of salvation end just because someone’s body dies? The work of Jesus must still be effective after the end of time or even after time runs out.

And here are some broader questions, at the end of the chapter “The Fire, the Wicked, and the Redeemed”:

Which vision of hell most coheres with the God revealed in Jesus — the view of hell in which persons suffer for all eternity with no hope for reconciliation with God, or the view of hell in which persons understand the depth of their sins, take full responsibility for them, and reconcile not only with God, but also with their victims? Which view offers a more compassionate eschatology? Which view takes more seriously the extensive significance of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus? Which view most adequately and permanently exterminates evil? Can hell coexist with God’s kingdom of love?

And there’s more. She looks at specific Bible passages and the meaning of Greek words translated “hell” or “eternal,” among others.

Then I appreciated where she looks deeply at the Old Testament sacrificial system. It wasn’t about payment, but about cleansing and dedicating your life.

For the Hebrew people, blood was a symbol for life or the giving of life represented in the Old Testament sacrificial system. So when the priests sprinkled the blood on the altar, it symbolized the people giving their own lives up to God as living and holy sacrifices. The blood served as an outward symbol of an inward reality: the life of the worshiper given to God, set apart (the meaning of “holy”) for God’s purposes.

And then she lists many Old Testament scriptures, especially from the prophets, where they learn God is far more interested in their hearts than in their sacrifices.

We needed to see the message of the prophets, proclaiming that God rejected blood sacrifices, the formalism of worship without the heart to go with it, and the shedding of blood without the investment of a life given to God to back it up. I’ll reiterate for the sake of emphasis: God never intended for Israel to kill animals and pour their blood out on the altar as an exercise in itself. God hoped the people would catch on to the true meaning of the blood poured out and perform their external sacrifices as a symbol for the true internal sacrifice of their very lives set apart to God and for God.

And there’s lots more about atonement, about forgiveness, about the kingdom of God, about Jesus reconciling people to God — and what that all means in our lives now.

Jesus makes this clear to us in John 13:35. He says that all people will know we are his disciples . . . how? By preaching hellfire and brimstone? By throwing around threats of eternal punishment for those who reject Jesus? No! All people will know we are the disciples of Jesus by the love we have for one another. Through our love for others! The very nature of our reconciliation with God through Jesus makes us God’s agents, God’s ministers of reconciliation — not so that we can work to keep people out of hell, but so we can transform the world through reconciliation. The only way to get rid of enemies is not to throw them into an eternal hell, but to preach divine forgiveness and guide them to a life reconciled with God and others.

As with all other books on universalism that I’ve reviewed, please don’t imagine that my summary is a complete argument or contains all the important points. I hope this review piques some people’s curiosity and inspires them to read this book.

There’s a spectrum for books about universalism that ranges from super academic and full of footnotes, designed for biblical scholars, all the way to books written entirely for laypeople and that don’t use a lot of Scripture references to back up their points. This book is pretty squarely in the middle of that spectrum. Maybe a little on the academic side, because it does get into the weeds of other ramifications of universalism — but she puts the notes into an appendix to keep the analysis flowing.

Highly recommended, and I do hope this will motivate some of my blog readers to read this book.

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