Book Review: All the Voices of the Wind

Book written by Donald James Parker  
Review from  Christian Review of Books (CRoB)  

All the Voices of the Wind is a delightfully believable and realistic love story from beginning to end. It follows the life of high school student Jeremy Dillon as he begins a promising senior year. Jeremy’s life is predictably derailed when fate places the beautiful Maria Masterson near him on his first day in school.

But Maria is not your average distraction. Instead she’s interesting, intelligent, and for Jeremy, utterly captivating, and he needs to know everything about her. The more he knows, however, the more he has to fear; but love overcomes fear, doubt and in Jeremy’s case temperance. What’s so dreadful about this girl? Well, firstly, she’s a Christian, but most condemning, she’s a doubter of evolution.

For most, these eccentricities wouldn’t necessarily be enough do deter a determined suitor, but Jeremy’s father is an atheist, Biology Professor, and most of all, the closest person in the world to Jeremy. With the force Maria exerts over him, Jeremy is pulled further and further away from the world of his father, and his ideas.

But Jeremy is convinced more and more that Evolution is bad science and becomes one of the leaders of the movement within his high school, not to ban Evolution’s teaching, but to let students know it’s also not necessarily complete fact. Neither Jeremy nor Maria expected the backlash that they would receive because of their effort. At the same time, Jeremy becomes completely unreasonable and unruly when dealing with his father (whose response isn’t any better), and a relationship most would describe as perfect quickly becomes dysfunctional at best.

What makes this a good and life-like story is the fact that Jeremy realizes what trying to have a relationship with Maria will likely cost him, and all but comes to a decision that it simply isn’t worth the price. But love, or God, won’t let the relationship die, and even though they never officially date, their love abounds.

Mr. Parker will tell you that this book was written to bring attention to the anti-evolution movement, showing it in such a way that it is more than just tired arguments and slogans. The love story is just the sugar that helps the medicine go down. The fact is, though, that the love story makes readers care about the characters, and instead of trying to put the anti-evolution advocates in the best light, he also treats them realistically. They are high school students after all, and their behavior and oftentimes arguments (that is, those in support of the anti-evolution movement) are very immature. The zeal and idealism is indicative of youth, as is the lack of indoctrination. If there is any flaw in the presentation of anti-evolution arguments, it is the fact that none of its advocates started with any real knowledge of evolution or of Darwin’s original work. But this is not a flaw of the book itself, since most people who oppose evolution do so based on the arguments of the anti-evolutionists rather than on their own understanding of evolution itself. In fact, one of the points of this book is to draw attention to the fact that very few folks have much knowledge of what evolution is really about. Oddly, even this apparent biased presentation gives credibility to the book, and, of course, some of their arguments are convincing in themselves.

The only problem with All the Voices of the Wind come from the fact that it was self published and has a few of the problems that plague self published books. Although the storytelling is very good, the editing is far from perfect with missing quotation marks (among some other problems) abounding. Fortunately, these errors seem to occur in the same way, and Mr. Parker’s style makes it easy to tell when what you’re reading is dialog and when it’s not. The book is, however, priced reasonably for a self published book so, pick it up today if you like love stories and are interested in the debate over evolution.

Review provided by the Christian Review of Books.  Written by David White.  Their website can be found at www.christianreviewofbooks.com

{mos_fb_discuss:30}