Another way of approaching Revelations

Book starts with the cast of characters divided into Believers, Professed Believers, Enemies, and Undecided. This cast changes slightly from book to book, but Rayford, Buck, Chloe, and Tsion Ben-Judah are still here. The story takes place after the resurrection of Nicolae and the indwelling of Satan. For economic and security reasons, all members of the Global Community must bear the mark of the Beast. Now, all the believers must prepare to hide.

This book, as are others in the series, difficult to read without reading the series in order. Without understanding the history of the characters and understanding what has happened to the world, you will be lost. Some elements of the story take a couple of books to work through, so just reading one will not allow you to see how it started or ended. The character of Hattie Durham is an example of this.

I would recommend this book if you have read the preceding books.

Should Christian fiction be held to a higher standard?

I've enjoyed these books and yet I have one REAL BIG problem with them so far. Everyone knows that when you read fiction you have to be prepared to suspend disbelief and tell yourself: "Okay, it's just a book. Everything doesn't have to make sense."

That's fine to a point.

But the LEFT BEHIND series is about events described in the Bible, and it seems to me should be held to a little bit higher standard. I don't expect perfection: the Bible is perfect, everything else is just a book. But I do expect a Christian novel to be thought out well enough by the author(s) that it's not shot full of holes by anyone with a high school education.

I have struggled with this since I read the first book in the series, but have not wanted to criticize the books when there was nothing better on the subject out there to recommend. Well, now I've found something, THE CHRIST CLONE TRILOGY by James BeauSeigneur. BeauSeigneur has done so much to insure credibility and accuracy in all the broad range of areas he covers in his series, that you'll find yourself believing it could all be true. And the way the story depicts the fulfillment of end-times prophecy will have you convinced that the author's got that nailed too.

I suppose I should say that some Christians get upset because the characters sometimes use a four letter word here and there. But, guess what, folks, non-Christians do that from time to time! (Confidentially, I've heard that even Christians have been know to utter a four-letter word.) Still the profanity is very limited. If you get disgusted with a PG-rated movie, you may not want to read these books. But even this is all just part of the accuracy. Does anyone who's read LEFT BEHIND really believe that Leon Fortunado NEVER cusses???

I could go on, but suffice it to say that if you want to read an end-times series that doesn't strain your ability to believe what you're reading, THE CHRIST CLONE is for you.

Better than people give it credit for

A lot of the reviews I have read of these books tend to put it down by comparing it to other end of the world books. And while I will admit that these are not as smart or engaging as some of the the better books that cover the same topic like Fire of Heaven or We All Fall Down, I still really enjoyed them. A friend introduced me to the first book and I cut through all 12 books over the past two months. In a way, it's not really fair to compare them to some of the other books because they are trying to do different things. Left Behind seems to me to try to simply tell a great story about the end of the world. It's light, but what's wrong with that? I really felt like I NEEDED to know what was going to happen next when I finished a book and the very next day would order the next one. I call that a success. A book like We All Fall Down is obviously much more intense and thoughtful, the characters seem much more like real people, and it gives you more to think about, but why does that make Left Behind bad? Can't The Ten Commandments and The Passion both be good movies?