More thoughts on Tuck

I've been reading the other bloggers' posts on Tuck and it's brought up a few interesting ideas I'd like to respond to. For a list of reviewers' quotes, please visit the Lost Genre Guild blog tomorrow.

Anyway...first up I just want to mention how awesome the final climax is. You have this incredible buildup to a battle scene, and by now we know what to expect from Mr. Lawhead - and we anticipate the roil of the fight, the zip of arrows, the fall of the dying. But then! Wait for it! There's this amazing twist in the end that totally turns everything on its head. That's just phenomenal.

Regarding the other reviewers, some have commented that the storyteller makes no judgement between the good Christians and the rotten ones. True. But he doesn't need to. It's obvious in the story. If you need to be told "this is bad" then I suspect you're not thinking for yourself. Perhaps it's a symptom of the TV age where folks are used to getting everything fed to them to be swallowed whole as-is.

Not so with Tuck. You have to read between the lines - and not so very far at that - to discover that Tuck is a faithful Christ-follower even though he loves to smash heads in, and that Hugo is a greedy, grasping loser even though he holds great authority in the church. It's not your status, it's what you do - your actions, that define what kind of person you are and I applaud the author in this case for showing, not telling.

Lessons learned are most often successful when we come upon them through our own thought processes. This book does that very effectively. It leaves me with plenty of ponderings, and that's good, because such a book will stay in my mind for a fair long while.

If you haven't already, please visit yesterday's post for my review of Tuck and a list of the other bloggers involved in the tour this week.