Review - The Restorer

The Christian Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog tour is highlighting The Restorer by Sharon Hinck this month. You can see yesterday's post for an introduction of the book, as well as the links for my fellow tourmates. I promised that I would post my review today.

Becky commented yesterday that a slight trend was developing that the guys of the CSFF tour may be less enamoured by this book. Certainly Sharon has some good endorsements from true-blue guys like Robin Parrish, T.L. Hines, and Randy Ingermanson.

Unfortunately, my opinion is that this may be more of a ladies read.

As I said yesterday, and the author freely admits, it is hard to categorize this book. This can create problems, because people like their comfortable descriptions ("You like reading Lori Wick? Try Deeanne Gist.") Like I posted recently, what would you think if Ted Dekker wrote a prairie romance (depends if it is written in true Dekker style, I suppose)?

I applaud Sharon's creativity to do something new. Inherent in this are the risks that something may not work across the board.

The premise is intriguing: a discouraged soccer mom gets pulled into an alternate realm and finds her calling to help the people. The book is written in the classic "lit" style (mom-lit, chick-lit), which fits with Sharon's two previous books. The mom-lit style tends to be a little light-hearted, which undermines the seriousness of the situation in the alternate realm in danger of being overwhelmed by enemies.

A couple of reviewers have noted that the main character spends a lot of time whining about her situation both in the real world and in her new locale. Some of this is to be expected in such a situation, but it does get grating after a while.

I've seen a lot of praise for her world-building, but honestly I felt quite disjointed by it all. It is a bit of "science fantasy", where there are some things that are futuristic like the transports mentioned, but other aspects of life are standard fantasy (swords and such). I wasn't able to picture the world very well-it seemed the description of different areas was either sparse or not very memorable. However, the preferred drink in the alternate world, clavo? I could almost taste it, as much as it is mentioned!

To be fair, there are some nice twists in the story. The major twist I didn't see coming, and was pleasantly surprised by that development. In the middle of the story the heroine has an epiphany of a spiritual experience, and I thought it was very touching and well-written. That is one point where I really felt drawn into the whole experience of the book, and it was very enjoyable.

But overall, it was more of a chore to read this book for the review. I think the idea was clever and had a lot of potential, but in my opinion it falls apart in the voice and world-building aspects and never really gets me to a point of investing in the book or characters. This is just my opinion-many of the reviewers this time site what I've just said as strengths of the book. So tomorrow I'll pull together a few of the reviews from the tour to give y'all a fair picture of The Restorer.