Book Review: Eve

Eve by Wm. Paul Young
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What is real and what is imagined, and how can we know which is which? This is the question that I arrived at by the end of the book.

I place Eve in a genre that combines sci-fi, fantasy, and spirituality. I best describe it as an imaginative re-telling and re-interpretation of the creation and fall accounts loosely based on Christian and Jewish traditions and mythologies.

This brings me to where I suspect many Christians will have a problem with this book: it does not follow the traditional (literal) biblical accounts; Paul Young takes great imaginative and fictional liberties in characterizations of both humans and God. Some may be bothered by the too-human characterization of God.

I think those of the Eastern and Orthodox traditions (vs. Roman/Western/Protestant) will have less of an issue with the way Young treats the biblical accounts. In this book, the biblical text is a starting point for exploration and discovery into "what might be," instead of a description of "what must be." God is described primarily in relational terms, rather than in law and holiness terms. Sin is a disease that must be healed, rather than law-breaking that must be judged and punished. God is a healer, far more and over a judge. The purpose of judgment is not to separate the righteous from the wicked, but to burn away all that is self-aligned (vs. God-aligned) within a person.

Inevitably comparisons will be made with Young's first book, The Shack. Both are re-imaginations of God, the Trinity, and their relationship with humans. Both attempt to show the primary attribute of God as love and his relationship with brokenness as The Healer. Where The Shack is set in a relatively small space, Eve encompasses multiple times and worlds. My opinion is that The Shack remains the better of the two.

There were some questions regarding the plot that remained unanswered. I think a few of these might be significant and thus diminished my opinion of Eve.

Some readers may fault the way in which Eve jumps from setting to setting and omitting what the reader wants to know to fully understand what is going on. But I think that this allows the reader to more fully identify with Lilly, the protagonist, and her confusion, her subsequent learning and development.

I enjoyed Eve and its imaginative retellings. However, I will caution anyone bothered by deviations from traditional (Western) biblical interpretations and theological perspectives to keep a very open mind when venturing into this book.

(This review is based on an ARC supplied by the publisher through NetGalley.)

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