Book of the Day Roundup: August 11-15, 2025
Jesusland
Stories from the Upside Down World of Christian Pop Culture
Joelle Kidd
ECW Press
Softcover $19.95 (352pp)
978-1-77041-779-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Joelle Kidd’s cultural critique Jesusland surveys the charming and perilous cultural artifacts and attitudes that defined evangelical Christianity in the early twenty-first century.
Kitschy aspects of Christian youth culture dominated much of evangelical life in the 1990s due to the booming cottage industries of Christian popular music, teen magazines, science fiction, and “clean” stand-up comedy. Kidd explores these issues through a dual lens: as a sociologist and as a firsthand witness and former participant in the culture. With a mix of nostalgia, skepticism, and ambivalent wonder, each chapter describes a distinct media genre that shaped contemporary evangelical identity, weighing the psychological and cultural baggage it created.
The chapters are spliced with Kidd’s personal recollections and reinterpretations of the works and the anxieties they created during her time as a pupil in a small private Christian school in Canada. Though each element of Christian popular culture receives individual treatment, the book identifies some general observations: The commercialization of religion helped create a culture of sexual repression, shallow spirituality, and openness to nationalist and authoritarian politics.
Told via a loose mix of reportage and memoir and with competing attitudes of nostalgia and skepticism, the book’s narrative style is congruent and compelling. Its attempts to connect developments in evangelical culture with the nascent MAGA movement and broader trends toward Christian nationalism in Canada and the US are convincing. And while many of the book’s more political pronouncements tread close to easy partisanship, its overall treatment of religion is measured and thoughtful throughout.
At once a cultural snapshot and an investigation of intransigent currents in religious thought, Jesusland delivers a nuanced analysis of the uneasy melding of religion and entertainment.
ISAAC RANDEL (June 22, 2025)
The Land of Faraway
Beth Kephart
Olga Dugina, illustrator
Creative Editions
Hardcover $19.99 (32pp)
978-1-56846-419-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
This fantastical picture book invites the reader to delight in the journey as it poses questions both fanciful and profound. “Would you wish to be young?” and “To whom would you sing your best traveling song?” are just two of the questions presented, the text scattered among intricate illustrations of eagles in sleeping caps, a gown adorned with frogs, and a cherub riding a lion through the sky. One read is not enough for this fabulistic tale, which closes with an invitation to begin again.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 22, 2025)
What the River Keeps
Cheryl Grey Bostrom
Tyndale Fiction
Hardcover $32.99 (368pp)
978-1-4964-8157-3
A scientist’s homecoming and river restoration work inspire her to face her childhood fears in Cheryl Grey Bostrom’s eloquent Christian novel What the River Keeps.
As dams on the Olympic Peninsula begin to close, Hildy, a solitary biologist whose specialty is fish, is called to the Elwha River to help with its rewilding. She’s wary about returning to live at her family’s resort, though. And her mother, who has dementia, faces long-term care. Hildy is also haunted by her father’s long-ago disappearance and by her own memory loss, prompting her to keep meticulous diaries to anchor herself.
Intricate vistas and lush natural details backdrop Hildy’s story. Her apprehension is mirrored in dark treelines and visions of shadows; her passion for the wilderness calms her anxiety, too. She catalogs birds’ nests and collects rocks, finding touchstones to comfort herself.
The mystery surrounding Hildy’s reclusiveness unfurls in time with practical challenges, including the resort’s closure. She’s helped by a compassionate staff whose members exhibit folksy wisdom. When a woman rents the cabin next to Hildy’s for a pottery studio, she brings her widowed carpenter brother, Luke, along to help, and he’s struck by Hildy’s shy beauty. They build a slow camaraderie as he encourages her to embrace pastimes she’s forsaken; he is patient as she reveals her mental health concerns. Ideas about faith and renewal underpin their romantic bond.
In the hopeful Christian novel What the River Keeps, a woman heals from her traumatic past in a beloved environment, unearthing stunning and macabre family secrets that allow fresh mercies to take hold.
KAREN RIGBY (June 22, 2025)
Trance
K. L. Denman
Orca Book Publishers
Softcover $10.95 (128pp)
978-1-4598-4132-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In K. L. Denman’s engrossing Hi-Lo novel Trance, a perfectionist teenager loses control.
Kira has a tight handle on her life and on her best friend Brigid’s psychic powers. When a horrible accident leaves Brigid’s client dead, Brigid is trapped in the past with the client’s ancestor. The key to saving Brigid rests with the late client’s biological family, so Kira digs into their past in order to save her friend.
Kira’s guilt over letting Brigid down drives her single-minded focus to get her back, which is portrayed through Kira’s negative self-talk after the accident. Because neither Kira nor Brigid has siblings, they think of each other as sisters, and Kira’s loneliness without her is explored in depth. And Brigid’s mother is untrustworthy, adding an additional obstacle for Kira. Kira’s yearning for her friend is palpable, and through her thoughts and memories, Brigid is fully realized. One example is when Kira reflects on Brigid’s altruistic desire to help others with her powers despite the risk it poses to herself.
The accessible prose services the book’s breakneck speed. The language is straightforward, thought-provoking, and often beautiful, as with the thematic line: “I don’t think I’ve inherited any lingering trauma. But what about the ripple effects of it?”
Action and intrigue dominate the novel, which features constant excitement and shifting momentum from beginning to end. Each chapter reveals both a clue and a new question to propel the story forward, with just enough twists to keep the mystery fresh throughout. Once the mystery is solved, Kira allows herself to slow down, reflecting on all that she’s learned in the bittersweet yet satisfying conclusion.
Trance is a captivating novel about the myriad lasting impacts of generational trauma.
LEAH BLOCK (June 22, 2025)
Sunbirth
An Yu
Grove Press
Hardcover $27.00 (256pp)
978-0-8021-6427-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Enthralling and surreal, An Yu’s dystopian novel Sunbirth reconsiders approaches to the end of the world.
Though the citizens of Five Poems Lake have had twelve years to adjust to the incremental loss of the sun, they still feel unprepared for its final disappearance. As society breaks down, an unlucky number turn into Beacons, their heads consumed by orbs that light and warm the darkened streets. Dong Ji and her sister, the novel’s narrator, are spared from this fate: Before their father died, he warned Dong Ji not to attempt to become a sun unto herself.
The novel shifts between a select period of befores and afters with mournful clarity, though it is tender and sparing with its details from the time when the sun’s presence was taken for granted. The narrator, who runs her family’s pharmacy until daily social functions break down, remembers the cool of lake water on her skin on hot days back then, though the lake has been frozen for years. She remembers the pride of being an honest policeman’s daughter, too, though this inheritance is challenged by the photograph that she and Dong Ji find among their father’s ashes—of a Beacon, years before Beacons were known to exist.
The novel’s shift from covering the daily habits of troubled subsistence living toward chaos is abrupt, imparting the inherent fears of apocalyptic disarray. Though the Beacons come to represent humanity-consuming despair, their extinguishable light not reaching the corners that it needs to, stronger flares are lit: In the form of love between sisters, the protection offered by a childhood friend, and the comfort of maintaining a family altar, making bird’s nest soup, or consoling a lonely neighbor.
Sunbirth is an illuminating novel about what people choose to preserve at the end of the world.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (June 22, 2025)
Kathy Young
