“The perfect travel companion, blissfully light and engaging”.
Redemption by Karen Kingsbury is the first in
the Redemption series, A trilogy revolving around the Baxter family, a highly
religious and orthodox family living in Bloomington, Indiana. Redemption, the
first book in the series redemption revolves around Kari Baxter. When Kari
Baxter finds out that her husband, Tim Jacobs a college professor who is having
an illicit affair with his understudy, her whole world falls apart. She is
further devastated when he asks for a divorce. The much distraught Kari takes
to religion and its echelons to save her and her marriage from this crisis.
Redemption is the story of betrayal and as the name of the book
gives away 'redemption', Karen reiterates that the troubles of Kari are not
enough reason to throw away a otherwise perfect marriage away and that marriage
like all relationships require care and effort. Redemption is by far Karen's
effort to convince the reader that even perceivably devastating betrayals in
marriage can also be forgiven and a that a stronger marriage can at times be
redeemed from these ashes.
Karen builds up a fairly elaborate family, each member with
their own problem and in midst of her narrative she occasionally takes a detour
to ramp the reader up on the background stories of the rest of the Baxter. Even
then she forgets many main characters and fails to build them up, unfortunately
they just remains as names and references. The most unforgivable of those is
the story of Angela, Tim's lover. Even though she is central to the story she
is conveniently forgotten. The story and its over reliance on religion and not
on reason and the fact that the very story that is central to the book, the
story of how the reconstructs their broken marriage is ill developed and leaves
gapping holes and enormous in-continuity in the narration.
Otherwise the 360 odd page page-turner is a fairly light read, its
one book that could keep you company during a short journey and would provide
you with reasonable amount of entertainment. It however doesn't reach up-to the
authors reputation of being an inspirational masterpiece.
Available at : Amazon.in
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