Book Review: For Such a Time as This

Title: For Such a Time as This

Author: Heather L.L. Fitzgerald

Date: 2018

Publisher: Heather L.L. Fitzgerald

Quote: "Haman was the kingdom's most desirable bachelor."

A group of writers took the same challenge: to retell the Snow White story as a novel in any setting but the original. This mashup of Snow White with the Bible's Book of Esther sets the overlapped stories in a world built from a mashup of science fiction and fantasy. Commoners get around the city of Susa in hovercraft, but Esther travels on one of a band of seven flying dragons. 

Is it Christian? The Book of Esther is Jewish. Fitzgerald's Esther certainly isn't Jewish, although the family friend who introduces her to the dragon seems to be; she hugs a dog close to her through much of the book, and when the dragons bring her a boar, roasted perfectly by their fiery breath, she digs right in. She doesn't mention being Christian, either, but her act of courage is counted in her world's magical system as a sacrifice that saves others. Is she a "type" of Christ in her fictive world? Possibly.

For me the multiple mashups don't work. For some readers they might. I take away an impression that the writer is a Christian who wanted to make this a Christian story, and think that investing more time and editing in the project might have made that work. I'm reminded of a particularly bad novel I wrote in college, which also tried to express Christian beliefs through a fantasy-genre setting, and which I'm glad I decided I hadn't lived long enough to make publishable. It's possible that living longer would have given Heather L.L. Fitzgerald ideas about either making this book better or making a different, better book, too. Well, she chose to publish it as it is. Somebody Out There may be glad she did.