Christian book reviews
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Read an Excerpt of Spero
"Spero is an imaginative fantasy that subtly instructs, entertains, and intellectually provokes the reader. It is fascinating reading. I'm definitely hooked on this series." Jean Heimann at Catholic Fire.
"...intelligent as well as inspiring..." Terry Barga at whattodoabout.com.
The first book in the Birth Pangs series, Fidelis, is Latin for faithfulness. The second book,
Spero, is Latin for hope.
Spero is an exploration, in fiction, of what hope is and why we need it. It is an exploration of what things are good to put our hope in and what things aren't. In the America of the future portrayed in the Birth Pangs series, all of the things that people have traditionally put their hope in have been brought low. There are no government agencies, no schools, and not even churches. In the face of daily perils, people have to figure out how where they are going to place their hope in dealing with them.
In the end, there is one daily peril that surpasses them all: death.
Spero is about people- even good people- putting their hope in lesser means to tackle lesser problems and being confronted with the consequences.
Spero is a 'discussion' about our chief problems and what solutions, if any, are available to resolve them.
‘Spero’ (Hope) is one of those Latin words that you sort of know, even if you were lucky enough to attend a school which didn’t obstinately prioritise fluency in dead languages. It is incorporated in quite a few modern English words, most obviously ‘desperate’, or ‘de - sperate’, meaning literally ‘without hope’. Fortunately, although the times that AR Horvath is writing about may indeed be desperate, the quality of the writing itself is far from it.
Spero elaborates on the events described in ‘Fidelis’, but starts and ends in different places. This may sound like an odd way to tell a story (book two of a series traditionally picks up where book one finished, after all), but it proves to be a refreshing and clever way to - almost literally - weave a narrative, with a different thread of the future history that Horvath is constructing being plucked out of the tapestry of the whole and examined. Read the rest of this entry »
