Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Edited: This ought to be a verified purchase review, but apparently Amazon has forgotten that I pre-purchased this for Kindle. I have been involved in Christian books for almost 2 decades (reading them for sure, but reviewing them, selling them, and interacting with them for the sake of others), and the gigantic flaw of most Christian memoirs is that they are simply and sort of dim-wittedly false. That is to say, they are too pure, too pat, too simple, too sanctified (or perhaps sanctimonious). They completely whitewash what it was to be a lost person before Christ, and they completely fabricate a life after finding Christ which makes it seem like those who are martyred are chumps for not following Him the right way. Those books, frankly, are a huge disservice to normal Christians because coming to Christ is nearly impossible if you are not starting from inside the Christian world, and once one is inside it is not an easy walk to die to sin daily and take up one's cross and follow. Books which say otherwise are lies -- a kind of religious porn which sets the wrong expectations for how loving God and loving your neighbor really works. I could continue to rant about those writers and books for 1000 words, but you are reading this review to find out if Andrew Klavan in another one of those charlatans or if he is the real thing. Let me not keep you in suspense: his book is the real thing, and he shines through it as the real thing. You can tell because what he does not do it to try to make his story into some kind of analogy for some religious paradigm of how a person is saved by Jesus Christ. He doesn't try to cover all the tropes the Top Men in Evangelidom are looking for in a "Jew comes to Christ" story. He doesn't try to tidy up his life or the people in it. Listen: if you are looking for one book to read to discover what Christianity is really about, and you are someone who has never really met a Christian or you think that somehow Christians are some sort of impossibly-cheery darlings in spite of inheriting a great world religion with a 2000-year-old history, you need to read this book to learn the truth about coming to faith in Christ. Even if it does not convert you or convince you, you will at least be disabused of the idea that the only way to become a Christian is to grow up homeschooled and sheltered from the world. Andrew, if you read this: there are so many of us who have stories like yours who are grateful for your transparency and simplicity to write this book. Thank God that He found you; Thank God you came when he called. Thank God for the story He baked into your life, and for giving you the artfulness to tell it to us.