Fallen from Babel

This is sort of momentous for me. This review marks the last book that I brought back from Dallas and the ACFW Conference. 'Course, that doesn't mean that I won't be reviewing books anymore. I have since spent a bit of money to create a whole new stack of books to read. And my lovely wife brought home Neil Gaiman's latest collection of short stories because she heard me mention once that I like his writing. I have a good wife.

Anyway, all that aside, earlier this afternoon I finished reading T. L. Higley's Fallen from Babel. In this gripping story of time travel, Professor Peter Thornton finds himself transported from 21st Century Boston to ancient Babylon during the time of the Jewish exile. He finds himself inhabiting the body of a priest named Rim-Sin and finds himself interacting with Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Higley does a marvelous job bringing ancient Babylon to life. There were many times where I was tempted to stop reading and do some digging into Babylonian culture myself, not because I wanted to check facts, but because it piqued my interest.

Higley also constructed her story that it kept me reading and kept me surprised. I was never sure exactly what was going to happen and there was one point where I definitely did not see a twist coming. It felt really, really good to be utterly surprised.

My one minor complaint is something that sometimes pops up in Christian fiction, and that's what I would call the "leap of spiritual maturity" problem. To put it as vaguely as I can without giving anything away, sometimes in Christian fiction, new converts are somehow given an extraordinary amount of spiritual maturity right out of the box, which often strikes me as a little untrue. This happens at the end of this book; I'll let you see if you can figure out what I'm talking about.

But this is still a fantastic book and I'm looking forward to reading more.