Christian fiction Archives

Oscar and the Mystery of the Glowing Orbs

Oscar and the Mystery of the Glowing Orbs (The Sensate Saga), Don Everts. IVP Kids (ISBN: 9781514012185) 2026.

Summary: Shortly after moving, Oscar starts seeing things and joins school journalists to solve a mystery.

Oscar had just moved to a new town in time to start his freshman year at Centerville High School. Due to a limp from an accident, he worried how he’d fit in. Of course, there were bullies to help realize his worst nightmares. At home, after the first day of school, he was thinking over the day when a mysterious silver orb appeared in front of him replaying a scene from the day. Was their old house haunted?

Then he began to see orbs elsewhere, and in front of other people. They seemed to occur whenever people were reflecting. But this didn’t help with his most pressing struggles. The bullies. The self-absorbed Mr. Shell, a health teacher who advised student council, and the ever-present Shane and Penelope. And he missed his friends, especially Regan, who seemed put off when he told her about the orbs.

Mrs. Robinson (“Mrs. R.”) saved the day. She was his English teacher and advisor for The Argus, the school paper. Although he said little, she seemed to take a special interest, as did Annie, the student editor of the paper. Slowly, he was finding friends. The staff of The Argus. A wheelchair-bound student named Timothy. Bobby Kim, an athlete. An art student. Eventually, Mrs. R and several of the students including Annie help him see he’s not the only one with unusual gifts. As a group, they describe themselves as Sensates.

And in short order, they have to put those gifts to work. Someone has spraypainted what seems like a racist message on a display case for the Scotties, an all-girl pipe and drum group. The questions go deeper than the vandalism and who did it. Very quickly, the school’s investigation is stopped. And pictures of the vandalism are removed from social media. Who is behind this and why? The Argus journalists and especially the Sensates put all their investigative skills and gifts to work. Even Timothy helps out, deploying his knowledge of how to use the old mimeograph machines and typewriters in the basement of Oscar’s dad’s bookstore.

In the process, Oscar not only forms new friendships but also comes to understand the role of prayer and how God can help him as the team investigates a dark conspiracy. He also learns that words are powerful and that, as Mrs. R is fond of quoting, “The truth will out.”

This is the first in what will be a three book Sensate Saga. One thing we discover at the very end of this first book is that not all the Sensates are on the side of good. The books are written for middle grade readers. In addition to being a page-turner, I found myself, even fifty years out from high school, connecting with feelings of fitting in, dealing with bullies, and the different personalities of teachers. I remember my own stumbling attempts to figure out what it meant to trust God at school.

In addition, Everts makes his lead character a bi-cultural student with a disability. Mrs. R is Black and the student journalists include East and South Asian students in addition to Oscar. Annie models strong female leadership. There is a strong anti-racism message. This is a book that connects with diverse audiences. But above all, this is good storytelling. I look forward to reading the next two books in the Sensate Saga!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Reading Evangelicals

Reading Evangelicals, Daniel Silliman. Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802886477) 2025.

Summary: A study of how the Christian fiction evangelicals read in recent decades shaped the evangelical imagination.

My wife was the former librarian at our church. That is, until people stopped taking books out and used the library as a place to dispose of books they’d read. Consequently, we decided to repurpose the space and get rid of most of the books. A large portion of those books were in the Christian fiction genre. Four of the authors discussed in this book were heavily represented–Frank Peretti, Janette Oke, Beverly Lewis, and Tim LaHaye.

This was not the Christian fiction that had formed my life. For that, I had C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, Flannery O’Connor, Marilynne Robinson, Alan Paton, and Frederick Buechner to thank. I realized that I had been formed in a very different outlook (and perhaps literary aesthetic) than the vast majority of my fellow believers. While we had our love for Christ in common, our perception of the world and what was important was just different.

What I could not easily put into words, Daniel Silliman articulates in this cultural analysis of the books evangelicals were reading from the late 1980’s into the late 2000’s. The book begins and ends with the closing of evangelical Christian bookstores like Lifeway and Family Christian by 2015. During the space in which the authors considered here wrote their debut works, these stores functioned as an expression of evangelical identity. Hence, one of the interesting questions he touches on is what will happen to that identity, which he sees as increasingly fragmented.

But the heart of this book is his analysis of five pioneer Christian fiction authors (six if you include co-author Jerry Jenkins) who contributed to the boom of this genre. The authors are Janette Oke, Frank Peretti, Beverly Lewis, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, and William Paul Young. Respectively, they pioneered Christian romance, horror, Amish romance, apocalyptic, and emergent Christian fiction.

What is striking is that each wrote books Christian publishing houses weren’t publishing that someone took a chance with resulting in huge sales. Silliman sketches the background of each author, the genesis of their debut work and how it ended up being published, and the market response. Then he reviews the storyline and prevailing ideas behind each book.

Oke’s books set romance within the context of the love of God and the life of faith. Similarly, Lewis’s books focuses on the choices of individuals, in light of their Amish identity. Peretti portrayed cultural conflict as a reflection of spiritual warfare. Then, Tim LaHaye set this conflict in apocalyptic terms to compel belief against conspiratorial world powers. Finally, William Paul Young’s The Shack is an early example of a deconstructed and reconstructed faith expressed through an encounter with a very unusual Triune God.

Silliman stops short of attributing the rise of support for our current president to this literature. However, he thinks both the individualism and the culture conflict motifs of these books cultivated an imagination that resonated with some of the things he said. He writes,

“The imagination was too small, I think. Too narrow. From my perspective, American evangelicals ended up too focused on their own private domains, too fearful of strangers, too fearful of change, too invested in the arrogance of always knowing the right answer. Imagining the chaos of modern life, the confusion, the hardship, and day-to-day struggle, the best-selling fiction gave the wrong answers. But I want more and more varied imagination, not less, so I will mourn the vanishing book market anyway.” (p. 220).

But with the demise of this vanishing book market, what will capture the Christian imagination? Will it be reduced to some form of political activism? Or will there be Christian writers of the caliber of a C.S. Lewis who will capture that imagination? The hunger is there. For example, consider the phenomenal current success of Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden.

What Silliman does show is the power of good stories to shape the imagination. But the question is, who are the new storytellers and can they tell a better and deeper story?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.