Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Oh man, this book made me really, really angry. It started out pretty entertaining, which is why I ended up reading the whole thing, despite the misgivings that started to kick in right around page 200 (which, right around page 250, slowly began to turn from simple misgivings to stunned horror). It's about a young married couple, Dan and Leslie, who are struggling with a variety of issues in their marriage (infidelity on the husband's part, and a loss of their business in Seattle) when they decide the best thing to do for their finances and their family of four (two kids) is to go live on the farm where Dan grew up. The farm, in Montana, has been struggling for a while, and Dan wants to return -- for a year only, he promises -- to help his mother get the farm back into good shape so she can sell it. Leslie is 100% city girl, an emergency room nurse and a lover of Seattle, and she agrees to the move as long as Dan swears -- really swears -- that it's temporary, that he'll be compensated for the work he does to the farm, and that they will not touch the thirty-thousand or so dollars they've worked so hard to save for their dream house. The problems start almost immediately. Leslie doesn't know anything about farming, and Dan's mother and one of his sisters are overbearing, judgmental, and just outright nasty people to be around. Everything Leslie does is wrong, and she feels lambasted and criticized at every turn, with no one there who truly supports her, including her husband. Speaking of her husband, Dan gets back to the farm and almost immediately begins to renege on every promise he made to his wife -- including essentially robbing the dream house account of $19K, without talking to Leslie first, so he can buy a tractor, and telling Leslie he has decided he does not want to return to Seattle. He doesn't support his wife's struggles against his mother's callousness, and when Leslie decides she wants to return to work at the local hospital, the one place where she does feel she fits in, he acts like a big stupid baby about it and essentially tells her doing so will destroy their family. Things go rapidly downhill from there. By the end of the book, Leslie has turned into a Stepford Wife, suddenly turning to religion (turns out, this is a Christian book, though after finishing it, I'm pretty dubious that its author actually knows a damn thing about Christian values) and falling in love with the farming life and her husband all over again. The reason this SO sickened me was because it made me realize that all along, Leslie was actually being portrayed sort of as the enemy of Christian ethics. She wanted to work instead of care for her children -- well, she'll soon learn that's not acceptable. She didn't want to go to church -- well, she'll soon learn the option is being alone and miserable. She wanted a husband who honored and respected her, instead of failing to support her, cheating on her, and flat-out stealing the money she'd worked so hard to earn for their future -- well, she'll soon learn she's to OBEY her husband, and that questioning his actions only leads to marital strife and unhappiness. She didn't like the judgmental way she was treated by her husband's mother -- well, she'll soon learn that his mother was RIGHT and that she ought to listen to her more often. Not only that, two characters in the book start out acting like non-Christians, and that's when they're supportive of Leslie, and then radically reveal themselves to be Christians after all, immediately snatching back their support of Leslie in the process (I'm referring to Dan and Kathy here, if you've read the book). What is this really telling us about Christian values, I ask you? The "good" Christians in this novel are mean, duplicitous, judgmental, and, in Dan's case, adulterers and thieves. The "bad" Christians (Leslie, e.g.) are struggling to do all the things that are actually good, in my opinion -- trying to raise her kids to be happy and making decisions based on what's best for them instead of what her mother-in-law wants, trying to maintain her own personal identity while also fueling her relationships and marriage, trying to adapt to a radical change in her lifestyle to support her spouse, etc. All in all, this novel left me feeling queasy and utterly, completely offended. I think all Christians should be outraged by the message of this novel, and that goes double for any Christians who are also feminists (and yes, there actually are Christian feminists!). Ugh, I can't believe I held this book in my hands and found myself ENJOYING it for the first half. I think I need a shower.