The Atonement Child

March 1, 1997
%% This is a multi-book review: SEE also the title "Scarlet Music." SEE the title "Ingenious Pain" for next imprint and review text. %%Collections of Christian stories are rare, but here are three.In "Earth Stories," Aurelio uses fables and parables to illustrate points of faith. He delights in drawing rather subtle morals: for instance, in "The Elusive Butterfly," a man reluctantly kills a beautiful, extraordinarily rare butterfly for the sake of science. Turns out he dreamed the episode, but then, wandering in the woods, he sees the butterfly of his dream. The moral is: "What is sometimes deemed virtue may just be the absence of temptation." Fables, no matter how nicely done, are best in small doses, but Aurelio breaks up his collection with several offbeat parables. "The Leper" is the ironic, intricate tale of a man in the time of Jesus whose strange birthmark allows a rival to brand him as a leper, even though he's perfectly healthy. The rival prospers; the "leper" becomes an outcast. When Jesus heals the lepers, the man's birthmark disappears as well, leaving him free to pursue revenge against the man who brought about his woes. But then he witnesses the Crucifixion and learns that the trials of Jesus, too, were brought about through lies and deceit, whereupon he forgives his enemy. As he announces in his subtitle, Aurelio is as much interested in the mystery of God as the love.Gulley's "Front Porch Tales" are a sort of hybrid between informal sermons and informal fiction but might be cataloged in the 200s. They are the short talks of a blue-collar Indiana Quaker and use anecdotes of small-town and country people to draw morals. Always entertaining, Gulley is at his best when he strikes his witty, laconically midwestern tone--for instance, when a more prosperous local preacher announces his plans to fly to Honduras. "It was the middle of winter," says Gulley, "when God routinely calls us to minister in the tropics." As Gulley's colleague expresses his fear of flying, Gulley comforts him "by pointing out that death by airplane crash, though increasingly common, was virtually painless."In a Readers Digest^-like format, Wheeler's "Great Stories Remembered" reprints sentimental stories of faith, adventure, and heroism, bringing together writers of a generation or even two generations ago, many of them not well known even in their own time. Faith Baldwin is here, however, and Zane Grey, in a rousing tale of a cowpoke outrunning a forest fire, "Monty Price's Nightingale." Dated and schmaltzy, for the most part, but some older readers might enjoy the anthology and might enjoy reading from it to children."The Rookie" is about a gifted young baseball player named Elgin Woodell, who makes it all the way to the majors by the time he's 14, rescuing his long-suffering mother from poverty and redeeming the legacy of his father as well. His father was also a great prospect and had signed with the Pirates but then boozed up his bonus money and, as the novel begins, is dying in an Alabama prison. The youngest player ever to reach the majors was Joe Nuxhall, at 15, but Jenkins makes his story believable by his masses of detail concerning strategies, statistics, and individual games, and through his portrait of Elgin, who is gifted but also obsessed. In the dreary Chicago winters, hour after hour, day after day, he teaches himself to hit on his father's old pitching machine, which throws out golf balls at 115 miles per hour. An engrossing tale, with a credible romance between Elgin's mother and a secondhand-store owner from whom Elgin buys his first wooden bat."Over the Misty Mountains" inaugurates Morris' fifth series with Bethany, The Spirit of Appalachia, though it...