1 out of 4 stars
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The book From Genesis to Genocide by Steven Bume-Ezewu is a historical fiction novel that focuses on the book of Genesis from the Bible. It is an original take on the biblical story. Atheistic Professor Andre Strasser, an archeologist at Harvard University, gets an invitation to go to Syria. His task there is to find the remains of ancient civilizations. While there, the professor decides to go hiking up a mountain with some volunteers. During his adventure, he happens upon the ruins of Noah’s Ark and some scrolls containing information on the book of Genesis.
As Professor Andre begins reading through the scrolls, the readers travel back in time. The novel begins to focus more on the retelling of the story of Genesis. It shows the trials that Noah had to endure when trying to convince the greater population of the upcoming flood. It also tells of what may happen to individuals who succumb to greed and materialism instead of God’s will. Additionally, the story focuses on the good that can come out of being a loyal servant to the Lord. The book consistently puts great emphasis on the theme of faith vs. realism.
This novel, unfortunately, had a lot more cons than pros. The book was very poorly written. It starts at page seven, and within the ninth page of the story I had already caught ten errors. A lot of the mistakes were grammatical inconsistencies, missing punctuation marks, misspellings, and poor sentence structure. One example on page eight reads, “He jettisoned the idea of a supreme deity which he strongly believed contradicted the evolution theory.” The author also used a lot of passive voice throughout the novel. One instance was at the beginning of chapter five, which read, “The best of the masters were consulted.” The usage of passive voice was very disengaging and ruined the flow of the story.
Another big problem I had with this novel was how flat and one-dimensional all the characters were. There was hardly any character development at all. The most that would happen is the greedy characters got punished for their actions while the humble ones were rewarded. The book doesn’t show any growth in the characters as a result of their experiences. Furthermore, the author seems too set on telling the story of Genesis, to the point that he completely neglects the character of Professor Andre after the first chapter. I would have liked to see the professor’s character development, especially since he is an atheist who happened upon a scroll of a biblical story.
I rate this book 1 out of 4 stars. The book had a good premise. The idea was promising, and the theme of faith vs. realism is always an interesting one to explore. Unfortunately, the author did not execute the story well. I suggest that this novel be rewritten and heavily edited so that it becomes a more appealing read. As of now, I would not recommend this book to anybody.
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From Genesis to Genocide
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