Sink your Teeth into High Court and Revolution: Raud Gríma and Myadar Sölbói cupcakes

Raud Gríma (red) and Myadar Sölbói (blue)

Buenos Baked Goods, Cherished Blog Audience!

Do fictional characters ever inspire you to bake things?

Even when stories they belong in have nothing to do with baking things?

Me, too! Assuming your answer was “yes”.

The other day, while I was doing whatever (probably wistfully contemplating car crashes whilist going 150% the speed limit), inspiration struck. Hence, half a block of cream cheese and a jillion dirty dishes later, Raud Gríma and Myadar Sölbói cupcakes! Those who’ve read Sophia Martin’s The City Darkens (Raud Gríma) (hereunto CD), know that Raud Gríma is a character in a bit of folklore from Myadar Sölbói’s locale. Said locale includes a big city where Myadar and her son Bersi venture to upon the summons of her basically-always-absent courtier-husband Reister. Then they get there and SHIT GOES DOWN. Shit that’s much more action-packed than a nice Protestant woman making cupcakes in the suburbs. Nevertheless, this cupcake experience, like CD, was not without twists and turns!

Dun… dun… DUUUUNNNNN…

The final product didn’t match up with what I had originally envisioned. I wanted the Raud Grímas to come off as a force to be reckoned with; the kind of cupcakes you wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley. So I decided they would be red velvet cupcakes with black frosting (yes, one can accrue the resources to render frosting black). But somewhere in the process of halving the already-halved recipe, I put in twice as much cocoa as was called for. What went in and came out of the oven was maybe a little red, but not enough, IMO, for there to be both black frosting AND associations with our masked, folklore hero. So I had to alter the frosting color to make up for the lost hue.
 

Halving the already halved

For Myadar, I thought it would be Right and Proper to make something boozy, like blonde Irish Car Bomb cupcakes; Myadar Moltovs, if you will. Mind you, my idea for Cupcake Booziness wasn’t justified by the revolutionary strand of the novel. Which strand justified it? Well, wouldn’t YOU like to know! (Read the book.)

Blonde car bomb concoctions, however, would require me to buy booze, and I hadn’t a clue what a nice, straight-laced Protestant woman like me would do with the leftovers. Now that Stephanie lives a seven-hour train ride away, there’s no easy way to pass off the leftover hooch to my klepto/nympho/probably-alcoholic sister. This is when I came up with the idea of halving the already halved recipe at the opportune time and omitting the red dye and cocoa from the Myadar part, despite small suspicions that it would taste like sour cream sprinkled with sugar.

The final product of the Raud Grímas weren’t bad. They were intense, but not as intense as other chocolate dessert items I’ve tried. I liked the Myadars better: if that’s what sour cream sprinkled with sugar tastes like, I’m surprised people don’t sprinkle sugar on their sour cream more often. Given the minor confusion with proportions of ingredients, I don’t exactly feel qualified to stamp the recipe I “used” with an official endorsement. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I used twice the prescribed amount of milk.

That being said, having read it hella times, I am qualified to put my stamp of approval on CD. And not just because it has no calories and costs less than the sum total monetary value of the milk and eggs alone! CD employs the perfect proportions of the following ingredients to effectively make it disel(perhaps deco)-punk delicious:

• gay love!
• theocracy!
• intrigue!
• clove cigarettes!
• “airplane” spelled “aeroplane”!
• men slicking back their hair with tonic!
• last but not least: [CLICK HERE FOR LAST INGREDIENT BECAUSE IT’S A SPOILER]

This magnificent e-tome is available for purchase at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

#forthecupcakes

Book Review: A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Written by Mary Wollstonecraft, Illustrated by Danielle Parado

When I initially found A Vindication for the Rights of Women (Illustrated) (for the name of the illustrator, see the title of this post), I was certain that it would be The Love of My Life.  I had been languidly flicking through endless the “Recommended for You” list on my e-reader, increasingly convinced that no one in the freaking world understands me, judging by how Amazon was so CLEARLY MISSING THE MARK on what I would want to read…* when this title stopped me. It was too good to be true: a classic text that I knew from experience would kindle my feminist spirit, paired with illustrations, which, judging by the cover, would be so bad ass that they may even prove to be tattoo-worthy.

However, the high expectations for the pictures in the book were not met. Yes, I read the sample. I figured that perhaps the cooler illustrations would be hidden later in the book, because once the concept of an illustrated Vindication was introduced to me, it was too good to be given up on. Thus, I paid the two bucks it cost and dove in.

Of course, I knew what to expect from Wollstonecraft, the literature itself was as rich and intellectual as I remembered, even if it did take time and patience to readjust to the parlance of 18th century prose. It’s also convenient to read Vindication on Kindle, because all the fancy lingo merely requires a poke to be defined.**

But, yeah, the illustrations. They were a series of simply rendered portraits. Nothing I’d have drilled into my skin, but nice enough. At first, I figured they were various forms of Wollstonecraft with artistic license, then I came across portraits in which Wollstonecraft suddenly took on the uncanny resemblances of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, and I oh-so belatedly realized that these were all portraits of DIFFERENT feminist figures throughout history. I couldn’t recognize them all, and wished the ebook had some kind of answer key to who was who. Alas, there was none to be found. These portraits weren’t a HORRIBLE choice. I don’t feel like I was ripped off, or insanely misled like I did with the Faerie Queene. They merely didn’t meet my expectations. And that’s okay.

Of course, it turns out that the artist responsible for the cover was not the same artist who provided the portraits, which explains a lot.

There are some errors in the text of this edition. The content isn’t misrepresented per se, but there are paragraph breaks where there shouldn’t be – at least compared to the Dover Thrift Edition, which I’m more inclined to believe, paragraph-break wise.

Highlighting is a sketchy experience. This is more Kindle’s fault than an edition-specific error. Every so often, there will be a phrase underlined with a dotted line and a note of how many people highlighted it. This is eerie, and annoying. Being a heavy annotator, it makes me a little self-conscious, as well as guilt-tripped because I’d loathe to contribute to this annoyance by highlighting anything. I don’t know if other e-readers do that, or if it’s just Kindle.

Thus, if you’d like to read Vindication, you could just as easily save yourself two bucks and find it at your local library. That or download it for free – she is public domain, after all.



* Such is life when one leaves it to corporations to fulfill their utmost desires. ‘Murcia.

** Mind you, the dictionary on my Kindle didn’t know what “Mahometan” meant (archaic, Muslim, I don’t know if it’s derogatory). Judging by the ways Wollstonecraft uses it (offhand, not very much, and employed as an adjective to describe something else), I don’t think she thinks very highly of Islam. It kind of makes me wonder how Islam was perceived in England and France in 1792.

Book Review: The City Darkens (Luka's Chosen) by Sophia Martin

The City Darkens (Luka’s Chosen) (hereunto CD) is a diselpunk novel set in a theocratic dystopia. It features country-dwelling Myadar who, with her son Bersi, is reluctantly whisked away to the city of Helésey by her domineering mother-in-law – the first of a succession of snotty characters – to join Myadar’s cold husband for the coronation of the konunger. The husband, Reister, lives in the city and seldom sees Myadar (who, by the way, is not snotty at all), but has summoned her to this coronation because, as Myadar soon finds out, court life is like high school on steroids, and jarls are expected to show up with their respective counterparts. And then the unexpected occurs, but such intriguing events are too wonderful for me to spill in a book review, because y’all should go read it for yourself and BE AMAZED. (Or read a slightly wordier blurb on GoodReads.)

CD may be Sophia Martin’s debut in high-fantasy*, but her talent for world-building attests to what must be a finely tuned fluency in such genres. Her descriptions of Helésey’s people and architecture, as well as the 1920s fashions floating around court, are thorough and immaculate – quite different from her Veronica Barry series, which is set in the very much not fictional city of Sacramento. The reader’s transportation to Helésey is further aided by strange titles for royalty and nobility – konunger/konungdis , jarl/jardis, etc. – but nothing for which a glossary is required. I found that the foreign words were successfully woven into the context of the narrative, so they did not break the spell or leave me puzzling over their meanings.

All the rich detail, however, does not drag down the plot. Perhaps because CD began as a serial novel, none of the chapters can afford to slow down for too long to luxuriate in sensory description. Each section of prose is dynamic with the increasing action of the novel: a well-paced whirlwind of the good, the bad, and the sexy that keeps turning corners until the very end.

More points of interest include airplanes, robots, female empowerment, and gay love – albeit, of all the sex acts in the novel, there is far more hetero than homo. Fans of Norse mythology will delight in the abundance of references to assorted gods and goddesses.

CD is only available in ebook format, and can be found for purchase on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.


* A term I have little authority in wielding, so I hope I didn’t wield it too inaccurately.

God Sex and Religious Weirdoes: a lengthy endorsement of Margery Kempe

WARNING: spoilers, dirty words, suggestions of God having a sex drive, and excessive use of the impersonal “you”

Wednesday before last, when I entered the back room of the English lab, someone’s Norton Unwieldy Doorstop was sitting open on a desk, color-coded Post-Its pasted here and there on the page. Its owner sat in a swivel chair, facing away from the tome, but not far enough away that she wouldn’t notice if I tucked the Doorstop under my arm and fled from the premises.

She (we’ll call her “Hero”, because that requires less explanation than “Stripper”) was chatting with Anita on the subject of God sex. God sex and exploding, cannibalistic babies, to be precise, but the latter is from a separate work, and for the purposes of this post, I’ll be focusing on the God sex.

The story goes that, on the one day she hadn’t done the reading for Early English Lit class, Hero found herself sitting in on a conversation about God and Jesus having sex with some woman.

God first, then Jesus.

This woman, “banging” Jesus in her spiritual autobiography.

Hero flipped a few pages and handed the open Doorstop to Anita. “See? Do you see this?”

Anita began reading aloud, “I take you, Margery, for my wedded wife, for fairer, for fouler, for richer, for poorer…so long as you be buxom…” Then, “Sometimes she heard with her bodily ears such sounds and melodies that she might not hear well what a man said to her in that time unless he spoke the louder”, to which Anita commented, “It sounds like she’s having temporal lobe hallucinations.”

Being English majors all reading from the same canon, I naturally had access to the same passages of The Book of Margery Kempe in my own, albeit emasculated – seeing as its been broken down in three parts – copy of the Norton Doorstop. So, for fun and avoidance of my history paper, I read it.

Maybe I’ve been exposed to too many smutty romance novels at Girl Scout Camp*, because the God sex did not measure up to the tittering in the tutoring lab. Mind you, the Norton can only provide excerpts of Margery Kempe, so maybe they craftily sidestepped the more sultry scenes, but what was there fell short of my expectations. I wasn’t expecting long passages of solid, hardcore pornography, however I was expecting to be shocked with something explicitly erotic – as much, if not more, explicit than the details how of her husband, after he “turned childish again” in his old age, “voided his natural digestion in his linen clothes where he sat by the fire or the table, wherever it might be, he would spare no place”.

God telling Margery, “Therefore I needs[sic] be homely with you and lie in your bed with you” and that “you love me, daughter, as a good wife ought to love her husband” is different than the narrator showing us… la di da, you get it (thinking about it now, I’m glad I was spared).

The most detailed description of physical contact we get is when, in one of Margery’s visions, Jesus kissed the Virgin Mary “full sweetly”, but that was different, and not just because it wasn’t Margery. I’m not convinced that particular kiss is meant to be taken in a romantic/sexual manner, nor, therefore, an incestuous/Oedipal one. Sometimes in the Christian tradition, people kiss other people. It doesn’t necessarily happen in the nice, Calvinist venue I pop into once in a while (like most other contemporary church-goers, we shake hands when we pass the peace)… but, for instance, in the film Vision, nuns be kissin priests and other nuns all the time. It’s not sexual. They’re not getting fresh with each other. That’s just how it is.

Mind you, Vision was set several hundred years before The Book of Margery Kempe. I realize that, without the research that I slothfully resolved NOT to do, there is a potential anachronism there. Said realization domino-effected me into another, this time unflattering realization that I may have been recklessly grouping old-timey Christian mystics together into a fascinating, exotic group, potentially condescendingly otherizing them for my personal enjoyment, harkening to mind, in trajectory, crap like Orientalism. If you’re not following, it may or may not make more sense after you read...

WHY I LIKED MARGERY KEMPE

First, a sort-of digression, because there haven’t been enough already: remember when Jesus was at a dinner party and some woman busts in (depending on which gospel account you read, it’s one of the Marys) and pours all this expensive nard (perfume) on Jesus’ feet and starts crying and wiping it off with her hair?

If you’re anything like my mom, that passage probably annoys you, because, well, what self-respecting gentleman would want some crazy woman crashing a dinner party so she could be a big weirdo and put on such a display? On the other hand, every time I’ve heard it at my church**, the Calvinists have thought it’s a courageous act of love.

Margery experienced a farther reaching gamut of reactions,

For some said it was a wicked spirit vexed her; some said it was a sickness; some said she had drunk too much wine; some banned her; some wished she had been in the harbor; some would she had been in the sea in a bottomless boat; and so each man as he thought. Other ghostly men loved her and favored her more.

Because Margery would go into these INSANE crying fits every time she had a vision of and/or was reminded of the Passion (both happened a lot!). It probably doesn’t help that she sees Jesus in the face of every handsome man and young boy. Margery is so overcome with sorrow and compassion that she balls her eyes out to a point where it’s described as “roaring”.

Mind you, the woman in the gospels probably deliberately tracked down Jesus and poured nard all over his feet, while Margery “knew never time nor hour when they [the visions and corresponding crying fits] would come” and couldn’t handle herself. Zero say in the matter. BUT THE POINT IS, Margery cries with sorrow and compassion and ultimately LOVE for Jesus --> Margery is a big weirdo for Jesus, just like Nard Woman is.

And, yeah, if I were walking around with Margery in public for a prolonged period of time, maybe my wretched colors would come out bleeding out of me and I would find her utterly irritating and humiliating, too, however, I’m not walking around with her, I’m reading about her, and from where I’m sitting – safely, here, behind my Norton Doorstop, hella years after the fact – I think it’s beautiful. Hyperbolic and beautiful and weird and strangely appropriate given the “ghostly”, antiquated state of the text.

Frankly, I think it’s touching how much she loves Jesus, and given the anticlimax of the on-the-whole NOT sexual scenes, I don’t mean LOVE in an explicitly physical way. When Jesus is sitting next to Margery while God is asking Margery to marry her (yes, that happened – and, yes, that was weird), and she didn’t know what to say, partially because she was in love with the second Godhead of the Trinity, not the first*** - that was, oddly, fucking adorable.

I also liked how Margery was seeing angels everywhere like glorious dust motes. That was pretty cool. To which Anita might point out the possibility for temporal lobe hallucinations. Which makes it….no less cool.
So, would I recommend Margery Kempe? Yes. If you’re not a hater who’s gonna be like, damn religious people and their rap music. Because when people get weird and religious, it’s kind of easy to be a hater. If you’re like me, and not my mom, you’ll find religious weirdoes much more admirable and loveable in the antiquated sense than in, say, in Flannery O’Connor, where peeps be flat out insane. If you’re like my mom, you’ll hate both, and you should read something else.

I think religious kooks of the universe have their place. They can be wonderful, in their way. Yeah, once in a while there’s a dark-side of it; a money-embezzling, Jew-bashing, gay-hating, heathen-killing part that rears its ugly head from time and time again, but if that makes its way into Margery Kempe, I was certainly blind to it. And if I did see that in her, I wouldn’t be recommending her to others. Religious weirdoes – especially of antiquity – are adorable and worth their weight in nard.

Good on you, Margery Kempe.



* Men penetrating women with wine bottles while in the back of a horse-and-buggy, whoa!

** Mom and I don’t go to the same church.

*** Perhaps could be construed as a wee Marcion-esque depending on how much you’ve been drinking that day (what?), in retrospect, but The Book of Margery Kempe is unlike Marcion in that she neither hates the god of the Old Testament, nor does he write Him off as a tyrannical douche bag.

Book Review: The Fire and the Veil, by Sophia Martin

Tortured psychic and high school French teacher Veronica Barry is back! As of just last week, Sophia Martin’s The Fire and the Veil is available on Amazon. A few things have changed since the last book, The River and the Roses. Veronica has a new boyfriend, and no car. Her best friend’s daughter has changed schools, and is now one of Veronica’s students…

But what hasn’t changed is the recurring, internal struggle of a psychic, and the deep empathy Veronica has for those she has visions about. The psychic’s condition is further explored in Fire on the subject of powerlessness. Veronica understandably gets frustrated with the duality of having urgent information, and being unable to disclose it without revealing her second sight. There are situations where it would be so much easier if she could just tell someone straight up what kind of trouble others are in instead of piecing together limited external evidence to justify actions that need to be taken. Save for the very few who know about and accept Veronica’s gift, laying out the facts as she knows them is not an option for Veronica, even when people are in pain.

Veronica’s internal dilemmas and monologues are something I was pleased to see carry over from the first book. I like other things about Fire, too. I like smooth, accessible flow of the narrative. I like Veronica’s dreams. I like the bits of exposure to other cultures (that alone is worth the read). I like the best friend Melanie, who is always available for pancakes and solidarity…

I do not like it when characters “out” other characters without their consent. It lowered my opinion of the one who did the “outing,” but not enough to smash the like-ability of the character altogether. Coming out of the closet was for the closeted person to do, not for anyone else to do for them. I don’t care if nobody ended up with targets on their backs or became an object of scorn because of it. It’s their news to tell.

For those who are liable to have a similar reaction: it’s also worth mentioning that this “outing” is only a small portion of the book, and therefore will only hurt for a minute. It is also a part of the story. Because of this, I can appreciate how it made me feel differently about the certain character. It made them all the more human.

So, if you like being transported to a place where teachers play a lot of hooky without the administration asking about the influx in sub-calls, and if you like a good psychic murder mystery, I advise you to take a look at The Fire and the Veil. To the readers who haven’t read River: don’t worry about getting lost. All the information from the first book that’s needed to get through the second is explained at the beginning of chapter one. It will feel like explaining, but there’s enough show-not-tell to save the recap from being the snoozefest it could have been.

To check out Sophia Martin’s blog, click here.

Book Review: The Space Between the Trees, by Katie Williams

In every college-level writing class I’ve taken, the professors have never waited for the second meeting to announce that fiction is a bunch of lies. I have also watched my share of TV specials about the stories of the Old Testament, in which most all the rabbis interviewed say that there is a difference between fact and truth. Long arguments about whether Moses led his people through the Red Sea or the Sea of Reeds are irrelevant when it comes to truth. Truth is the heart from which meaning beats.

Katie Williams’s novel, The Space Between The Trees, is told through the eyes of a teenage liar. Evie may not be a compulsive liar per se, or one psychologically divorced from fact-based reality, but lies nevertheless come out of Evie’s mouth as loose and easy as an exhale. Some are quick, one-line knee-jerks, as in the answering of a question. I was provoked to yell at the plucky, young heroine on two occasions when she demonstrated how she can lie herself into a corner with a single sentence. Some of her lies are longer: weaving the story of a social life to protect her mother from worry, or inventing episodes fraternization with a local hottie to prick the ears of a few of her peers.

Evie has undeniable expertise telling stories; applying character traits and sensory details from life to her untamed imagination. Since stories give meaning and pump life into truth, Evie, then, is in the right place at the right time when she witnesses the kind of thing that begs for truth. On a Sunday morning, Evie watched a pair of ambulance workers carry a body bag on a stretcher from the woods that border the otherwise quiet neighborhood where she delivers newspapers. The body was once that of fellow Chippewa High student Elizabeth “Zabet” McCabe, who was beaten to death the night before.

The stories Evie tells after Zabet’s murder will sound like truth to some, and just plain lies to others. An unspoken, mutual desire for meaning draws Evie together with the rebellious, cigarette-smoking best friend of the deceased, Hadley Smith. Each one has something the other wants; Evie has sensory details about Zabet’s death, and Hadley about Zabet’s life.

If you want to read about the adventures of an unlikely pair of teenage girls and how meaning-makers respond to untimely deaths, The Space Between The Trees is a solid investment of your time and money. The Kindle version is, of course, profoundly less expensive than the hardcover, however I would advocate purchasing the latter for the simple reason that it is one awesome cover. Williams herself said that when she first saw it, she genuinely thought, “I hope readers judge my book by its cover. I couldn’t believe how different it was, how gorgeous, how evocative.”

As far as what’s between the covers goes, Williams’s choice of adjectives hit the nail on the head. Space is 274 pages of “gorgeous and evocative” descriptive language. Evie may be an awkward character, but the narration is beautiful. If you’re anything like me, you might enjoy the unique and inventive metaphors, too, if you wake up on the right side of the bed…

Yes, the language overall never stops being beautiful. But the volume of metaphors is the worst I could drum up about the book. There’s nothing wrong with the word “like,” and there’s nothing wrong with the way it was used. It’s just the sheer volume. If you’re sleep deprived and/or your girlfriend just left you,* the excess of “likes” will be the first thing to grate your nerves. The same thing happened in Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants (also a good investment of your time and money!), only, in the case of Elephants, it was to a greater degree.




* Please don’t use the “girlfriend just left you” example to make inferences about my personal life. It was just an example. Or, for the purposes of this post, I’ll call it a lie.

Book Review: The River and the Roses, by Sophia Martin

It’s true that a good way to make an afternoon disappear – or several afternoons if you’re a slow reader like me – is to download and open up Sophia Martin’s novel The River and the Roses. River features high school French teacher Veronica Barry, who, once she overcomes the denial of the psychic abilities she was born with, has a knack for having visions and conversing with the dead. Her involvement with a homicide investigation kicks off with a terrible dream from which she wakes up holding a freshly murdered woman in a park. Tendrils of subplots weave their way to a conclusion, and Bob’s your uncle, there’s your psychic/ghost murder mystery.

It’s also true that, should you choose to make your afternoon(s) disappear in this way, you will be exposed to an insightful message about self-discovery and sacrificial love. Veronica’s ways of willfully ignoring her second sight come to an end when the daughter of her friend-of-twelve-years, Melanie, does not come home from the Valentine’s Day dance. Veronica reluctantly gives in to Melanie’s forceful pleas to use her gift to locate the lost daughter, Angie. After Veronica’s visions lead to the recovery of Angie from the side of a riverbank in another county, Veronica makes the decision to stay tuned in to her clairvoyance, a choice not unaccompanied with struggle.

As external risks go, Veronica faces the potential scrutiny of looking like she’s crazy, and definite scrutiny of being suspected for a con. What living into her gift also means is inviting situations that can be uncomfortable: giving into seeing the visions of past, present, and future that come to her, opening herself up to seeing ghosts and letting them into her head.

Veronica says that finally accepting her gift and purposefully living into it makes her feel, “stronger, and – uncomplicated.” But, like I said, Veronica does continue to grapple with it, a lot. There is no one event where all the emotional lumps smooth out, leaving her with no qualms about her purpose. The dilemmas and uncertainty on her path to self-discovery are explored in introspective monologues, a characteristic of Martin’s writing that can also be found in her first novel, Broken Ones. These dilemmas about risks and negative connotations can be about as discomforting as the more sensory unpleasantries like being surrounded by ghosts at a funeral home. There are times when Veronica wonders if the second sight has any use at all but is “a nuisance, like an eye twitch or an allergy.” There are occasions when she wishes intensely that she could go back to rejecting prescient dreams. But despite all this, Veronica’s psychic purpose wins, as Martin eloquently articulates: “Spiders of shame still crawled in the back of her mind but they had lost their power.”

Traveling the road less comfortable is not primarily motivated by making spiders powerless. It is recollections of Angie’s rescue from the riverbank, and Melanie’s profound gratitude for her daughter’s saved life that fuel Veronica’s determination to go forward. It is for sacrificial love, not the pursuit of personal wholeness, that Veronica stops anesthetizing her second sight. This not only helps Melanie and Angie, but invites opportunities for Veronica to help ghosts and the living alike, running the gamut of aiding murder investigations to saving pet fish.

So there you are. If you want to curl up with a paranormal whodunnit that not only satisfies a craving for murder mystery brain candy, but also dips into the inner life of someone who loves her friends, The River and the Roses is just the ticket. Although, there is a subplot with a fraudulent ex-boyfriend that begs to be developed. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Martin will publish a separate novella on the thread, like she did with Veronica in Paris. Oh, and if you’re sensitive to ghost imagery, there was a brief, visual description that resulted in me sleeping with the light on. Just a warning.

Book Review: Frameworks, by Eric Larson

For some, there are big question marks regarding how to approach Scripture. The New Testament alone has twenty-seven books, and someone might suggest to start with John or Romans even though they’re not the first in canonical order. Once the reading starts, the cultural differences between our modern milieu and first century Palestine can make certain things hard to understand. Readers who are in want for a guide through this very important book written in a very different time may look no further than Eric Larson’s Frameworks for their navigational needs.

Frameworks is designed to be accessible and unintimidating, introducing the New Testament book by book in words and graphics arranged on the page in simple, uncluttered layouts. The chapters begin with metaphors relevant to the books’ themes, running the gamut from skyscrapers to hurricanes to the goddess Fortuna (in the case of that introduction, the anecdote describes how she contrasts with Jesus). The chapters include tools like pictures, maps, outlines, verses to look out for, and “Did you know” factoids. Larson’s insightful commentary and invitations to spiritual reflection promise to also satisfy the interest of the seasoned Bible reader who does not find navigating the New Testament all that challenging.

The content of Frameworks has its overlaps with what might be discussed by non-religious scholars, such as the gospel of Matthew being written with the audience of a Pharisaic community in mind. However, despite overlaps, Frameworks is not the stuff of your Oxford Study Bible footnotes. Larson is a believer, writing to and for believers and people interested in viewing the Bible from a Christian perspective. Larson does not hem and haw, trying to cover all his bases by prefacing, “Well…not everyone believes this particular interpretation, and you know, whatever floats your boat, but…” Larson will point-blank refer to Jesus as “our Savior,” and similar titles of divinity, from time to time. While Larson makes no apologies about his faith, he also does not digress into compare and contrast essays about how his is better than yours.

Being a believer myself, the last thing I’d have a problem is Jesus sincerely being addressed as “Savior.” I did my best in trying to find a problem with Frameworks, because it felt The Thing for a book reviewer to do. In the end, all I could come up with was the absence of the Greek vocabulary Larson shares in his Bible study classes (which I’ve had the privilege of sitting in on). But in the interest of staying concise and equipping readers instead of bogging them down, I appreciate the lack of the lexicon. Frameworks as it is accomplishes its purpose: giving an introduction to the New Testament in a format that balances information and simplicity.