Book Review: Child of Another Kind

Title: Child of Another Kind 

Author: Steven Decker

Date: 2023

Publisher: Tier

ISBN: 

Length: 316 pages

Quote:  "Maddie...can extract information from people's minds, and she can plant information as well."

Maddie is a space alien. Part of the plot in this book is finding our what kind of alien she is. Maddie and her adoptive mother are each other's closest friends. When Maddie's alien nature is recognized, she and her mother are kidnapped by different organizations. Another part of the plot is finding out whether, how, and where they'll ever be able to live together again. 

A big part of the plot is that Maddie's mother is a Christian, although Maddie isn't and although the reality of the story seems to support an alternative religious view of life. Decker doesn't reach, or allow his characters to reach, a final conclusion on questions like whether humans were created by God or manufactured by superintelligent aliens. 

This makes the novel appear to be saying "There's hard evidence that Christianity is not true and no hard evidence that it is true, so the interesting thing about Christianity is how and why people manage to take it seriously." There's some truth in this statement, though I don't believe there's nearly as much truth in it, in the real world, as there appears to be in the novel. It is an objective fact that Jesus of Nazareth has not been walking around, annoying people, blurting out inconvenient truths in memorably snarky stories, bashing Jewish traditions as only a known descendant of King David could do, making religious authority figures look silly, hanging out with well-known sinners, really acting daffier than Michael Jackson, Kanye West, and Madonna Ceccone together only with good reasons for every wacky move, for almost two thousand years now. If He lives in our world, and I say He does, He lives in the hearts of those who love Him. It behooves Christians to persist, as Maddie's mother does in the novel, in showing that whatever "evidence" to the contrary may exist, Christianity is still real in a way false claims generally are not real. 

But I don't like this novel's fictional overstatement of this truth. Nothing requires me to like it, and I don't. There's a song that makes the same point more efficiently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAUSNEuW690&t=50s); I like the song.

You may like Decker's speculative-not-science fiction premise, so there's no reason for you to be put off by the fact that I don't. It's possible that different literary techniques would have made the novel more appealing to me; it's possible that they wouldn't have helped me, too, and that the techniques Decker uses may work for you. 

I don't want to be another "literary" critic quibbling about techniques when the bottom line is that I don't care for the content. So I'll stop quibbling. But I will, because this novel seems to spend more time bashing religious faith than upholding it, classify it as a non-religious book and post the review on a Wednesday rather than a Sunday.