Wordsmith, The Kid, and The Electrolux
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Good Stuff: Get it!I agree with the earlier reviews of this book. It is an outstanding read. Leigh massages the right side of the brain: he makes you use and exercise your Christian imagination. You can't just read it and set it down. If you read it deeply, the images and stories will stick in your head after you set it down. And the images and stories are ones that are helpful for a Christian's walk. If you read the book rightly, it will grow your imagination in a godly way, very much like Lewis and Tolkien.Preachers of sermons and hearers of sermons need to read books like this! It reminds us that the Christian faith is not a bunch of flat propositional statements, but a dramatic 3-D story of sin, salvation, and service.I hope Leigh writes more!
April 22, 2009
This book is classified as fantasy fiction. Young Corian (Corey) Griffin's secret life began the day his father refused him a cup of coffee. After his father has to go away for work to save their home from foreclosure, Corey's growing desires draw him again and again to the coiling dragon on his father's green Chinese box to steal money kept there to buy from Mr. Good the ice cream man, which begins to rot his teeth. After a visit to an eccentric dentist, Corey is nearly caught by his mother and is forced to hide in a closet to eat his ice cream and there, through the power of a supernatural Electrolux vacuum cleaner, he falls headlong into book of photographs. In this hidden world, where everything is a living picture, he meets several strange people and encounters some extraordinary events.Corey and his new friends go into pictures where a great battle occurs, a huge baby is rampaging in a house, and a being called the Wordsmith creates an amazing tree-machine. They are taken by Kosmo and Fern Kreecher to New Dragenstoy for re-education, where the secret is revealed. In another picture Corey sees The Kid (a scapegoat) upon whose head all the bad pictures are placed before it is sent away. The surreal descriptions are apparently intended to appeal to the young people of today, but the allegorical implications are clear. The book is well written, and I found myself drawn into the story with a motivation to keep on reading so that I could find out what was going to happen next. This kind of work may not appeal to some people, but those who like fantasy should appreciate it. I enjoyed it and hope that it will accomplish its purpose.
October 14, 2008
The simplest of things can go and turn one's life completely upside down. "The Wordsmith, the Kid, and the Electrolux" follows Corian Griffin as he embarks on the adventure of his life - and it all started because his father wouldn't give him a cup of coffee. A strange path of dragons, ice cream, and closets doesn't seem to be making things any better! A finely written piece of fantasy, "The Wordsmith, the Kid, and the Electrolux" is highly recommended for community library young adult fiction collections.
October 14, 2008
I highly recommend this book for teenagers, young adults, and adults. It is a thoroughly Christian allegory in the Reformed Protestant tradition (with an embedded classic Van Tillian apologetic). Once I started reading it, I was gripped by the story and could not put it down. The story biblically deals with the problem of sin, the fight against sin (the old man versus the new man), the blindness of the sinful world, the antithesis between Christian's and the world, and concludes with a highly energized defense of the Christian faith. Excellently written!!
October 14, 2008