3 out of 4 stars
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Joe Connelly has what many men would want in life: a family business, a baby, and a beautiful wife. Yet, everything Joe has is overshadowed by a painful, devastating issue. His wife, Brooke, is losing her battle against breast cancer, and there’s nothing Joe can do to change that. He’s facing a future without Brooke and has no idea how he’ll properly care for his young daughter in Cancer, Faith, & Butterflies, a novel by author Johnny M. Sanchez.
There are complex aspects to dealing with death and grief. In this novel, the author tackles that complexity in a down-to-earth way, chiefly through Joe, a believable protagonist. Joe wants to raise his daughter in a manner that will honor Brooke, a Christian woman. However, Joe has never fully shared Brooke’s faith. There’s a realistic tension between Joe’s desire to respect his wife’s wishes and his struggle to decide if the God she prays to even exists.
Then, Joe not only has to cope with the harshness of the present and the uncertainty of the future but also the reality of the past. The problems that are compounded to the plot are related twists, not arbitrary ones. Hence, the plot remains engaging without wandering. A story that could have been merely dark or depressing becomes poignant as the author brings all the pieces together.
Although the writing style is clear, there’s a novice feel to the wording and the flow. The characters exclaim in “all caps” at times, which can be effective in informal communication but can seem over-the-top in a novel. The writing is also repetitive in places, in the excess of semicolons and especially in the author’s substantial overuse of the word “just.”
However, my main concern is the number of errors in the novel, particularly regarding the dialogue. Sometimes the author has two or three different characters all speak in the same paragraph, but there should be a new paragraph for each new speaker. There are many missing quotation marks, and in numerous places, there are no dialogue tags between a character’s words and the character’s actions. For instance, “He smiled” is not a dialogue tag. It would need something other than a comma before it leads into the smiling character’s words.
There’s also a good deal of past/present tense confusion, run-on sentences, and apparently random treatment of the pronouns for God. Unless the differences are there to add meaning to the story, the pronouns for God should be consistent, either all capitalized or all in lowercase. As an additional note, if Christian or inspirational fiction readers are this book’s target audience, a number of them may be put off by the handling of some of its material, including the language. There are many who’d consider words like “hell” and “damn” to be inappropriate when used in ways other than their literal meanings.
Nevertheless, despite the book’s technical and stylistic imperfections, the story itself is relatable and well-thought-out. It deals with difficult, real-life issues in a way that cultivates empathy. Therefore, I give Cancer, Faith, & Butterflies a rating of 3 out of 4 stars. I’d recommend this novel to fiction readers who appreciate stories that bring hopeful messages out of tragic situations.
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Cancer, Faith & Butterflies
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