Sometimes I Feel Like a Piece of Bologna

Fiction Friday: Lost Mission

Provocative. Penetrating. Painful. Lost Mission by Athol Dickson is haunting story that will remain with you long after you’ve read the last page.

What secret legacy awaits deep beneath the barrios and wealthy enclaves of Southern California? In a story that spans from the late 1770s to the present time, we meet:

• A Spanish friar compelled to bring the gospel to the Indians of New Spain
• An illegal immigrant desperate to feed his family.
• A billionaire driven mad by grief.
• A pastor in love with the wrong woman.

Only Lupe de la Garza, a humble shopkeeper compelled by God to leave her tiny village deep in Mexico to preach in America, can save them from the ancient evil lurking in a lost mission's ruins, but it will take an act of faith beyond all human power.

An idyllic Spanish mission collapses in the eighteenth century atop the supernatural evidence of a shocking crime. Twelve generations later the ground is opened up, the forgotten ruins are disturbed, and rich and poor alike confront the onslaught of resurging hell on earth. Will the evil that destroyed the Misión de Santa Dolores rise to overwhelm them?

This book is a compelling read. I was both captivated and disturbed from beginning to end. The various threads flowed at several levels, playing with my mind and emotions in the midst of a well-written story. But I realized that Dickson had used the ploy so common in film and fiction today. The protagonist—Lupe—is an illegal alien who broke the law to enter the US in order to preach Catholicism based on an icon to pagan, Protestant America. The Christians in the story are stereotypical--a wealthy man whose grief-decisions are characterized as greedy and a young pastor who breaks the law to serve illegals. I found that approach disturbing and left the book feeling manipulated.



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Labels: book review