When I was younger, I used to read a whole book in a day. Occasionally I would read multiple Nancy Drew and Boxcar Children. Yes, I would like to claim my bored homeschooler card. Then as a teenager those books turned into The Inheritance Cycle and Ms. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. My introduction to those series, however, was several years ago, and since college, I have not found a novel or series which I sat down and read quickly because I enjoyed it. Bethlehem College kept me reading books in a day, but I cannot honestly say that I enjoyed all of what we read. I was in a drought of having any good novels to read, until I picked up, Ride, Sally, Ride.
Pastor and author Doug Wilson is one of my favorite bloggers, and when I first heard the ad for the novel, I was intrigued. Doug has a unique style of writing which I have mainly appreciated through his blog and his book Confessions of a Food Catholic. To say the least, Ride, Sally, Ride did not disappoint.
The whole story is set about twenty years into the future in a very divided United States, in what I might add is a somewhat optimistic perspective of the future. The main character, Ace, has destroyed his neighbor’s wife, a sexbot, and is now on trial for murder. The whole story centers around this court case of proving that Ace is guilty of murder rather than destruction of property. His trial gets wrapped up into the overall larger battle happening between the red and blue states.
The first thing that I really appreciated was several scenes discussing proper sexuality and how humanity, particularly women, are benefited by it. Granted, being that it is a book about the destruction of a sexbot, one might expect that.
Another thing that I really appreciated was the portrayal of the character, Benson, Ace’s father, an oversensitive evangelist. He has a heart for the unsaved, however, his theology is rather weak. His method tends to be to just love people and to never do anything to offend them. Unfortunately, I would say that Benson is a great representation of many evangelical pastors today.
The last thing I want to say about this novel is that it is not unbearably corny. Unfortunately, within Christianity there is a tendency to create very bad quality movies and books. This bad reputation has caused me to tend to shy away from most novel’s that are hailed as “Christian.” Ride, Sally, Ride, however, did not bear the usual source of cringe that I have seen in other Christian novels. Doug’s book has given me some hope for the Christian novel hemisphere, and I hope that more Christian novelists like him appear.
So overall, I would highly recommend this novel. It has been a long time since I enjoyed a novel so much. In all honesty, if the future does turn out the way it does in Doug’s novel, I would be content with that.
Natters Matters 