The Twilight of Courage: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A disapointment
Review: I LOVE Brock and Bodie especially the Zion Covenant series but this bok was such a BORE. It is the only one of their books I have not cared to finish. I just gave up with about 85 pages to go because I simply did not care what happened. Now it is just taking up space on my bookshelf.

Rating:
Summary: On War and God
Review: Quite possibly the two greatest driving forces in the universe, Brock and Boede Thoene write a version of fiction so real, it makes me want to go down to the library and search for the characters names in the microfisched newspapers. I've been reading their work since I was twelve and I get more and more out of each book every time I read them. This book is a true portrait of struggle with subtle but deeply embedded overtones of faith. The Twilight of Courage is one of brightest stars in my library and a magnificent read.

Rating:
Summary: Mallowcups for Bodie and Brock
Review: Under duress, I recently confessed my favorite Thoene novel: Twilight of Courage. (It's like admitting you have a favorite child.) A friend of mine who has read only non-fiction books for the past 7 years agreed to read this one only because it is fiction based on fact. He loved it. (I, in turn, had to read a non-fiction book. He chose for me "Fate is the Hunter", a book so well-written I couldn't help reading it.)

I told my friend about the background to this book, which I know because I wrote a review in the Grand Rapids Press years ago: the Thoenes spent four months on a barge in Paris, with assistants, researching this work. They asked elderly Parisians this question: Where were you the day France fell? Seemed they all had a story. From those stories came this book. It's what got my friend to read it.

That's what I love about the Thoenes' work. Winston Churchill said something about hinges, that isn't interesting upon what small hinges events turn. The Thoenes seek out those hinges and give them a rightful place by recording them. Fact couched in fiction? Sometimes that's the only way a story can be told. That it is told at all is the only thing that matters. From Marcus Aurelius..."Look beneath the surface; let not the quality of a thing nor its worth escape thee..."

Mallowcups for Bodie and Brock. Cheers for their dedication to rusty old hinges.