Jerry B. Jenkins says Riven is the book he's always wanted to write. This novel was worth the wait.
The plot is divided into two story lines: one being about a struggling pastor moving from church to church, and the other being about a teen living in a trashy trailer park with his dysfunctional family.
The pastor is also having family trouble: his wife has a secret she won't talk about and his free daughter has decided to move in with her boyfriend.
The teen, some may say, is a victim of circumstance, that circumstance being his crazy mother. But he does plenty, don't you worry. He's into it all-smoking, stealing, and strangely enough, acting.
Eventually, the pastor ends up in prison ministry and the teen ends up in jail for various crimes.
It takes over three hundred pages for their two paths to cross, but it's all worth the wait. The 526 pages of the novel show that Jenkins put a great effort into developing the characters and their histories. Everything is extremely realistic: the characters, the settings, the situations, the dialogue.
But the best part of all is the extremely original end. No one has ever written anything like this book before and I don't think there will ever be anything like it. My one warning is that Jerry Jenkins end his career with this book instead of with another.
5 stars
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