Forbid Them Not

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 21 JAN 2002

While there's nothing wrong with fiction that hammers home a message, this inspirational novel for the Christian market buries a story line in so much extraneous material that the message loses its punch. It's an ultra-conservative message, even by CBA standards. The year is 2005, and Cooper Stone has just taken the most challenging case of his legal career: defending two families who may have their children taken away from them by the government. The Committee on the Rights of the Child has worked for 30 years to begin "bold action" to overturn the death penalty, bar parental consent for abortions, ban spanking and do away with religious teaching that says the only way to God is through Christianity. The committee chooses two families as its first test cases, and the resulting battle ends up in the Supreme Court. As the story unfolds, Stone and Sunday School teacher Laura Frasier fall in love, which the author uses as an opportunity to sermonize on the problem of dating before people are ready to marry. The book is far, far too long at 480 pages. To follow the plot in one section, readers must wade through as many as seven consecutive pages of e-mail transcripts from a Crosswalk.com chat room. These are immediately followed by almost eight pages of undiluted dialogue between Cooper and his friend Peter Barron. Somewhere along the line, good storytelling got confused with propagandizing and proselytizing, and the result is a drawn-out, disappointing read.