Customer Reviews

Earth Has No Sorrow

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Michelle Blake a Harvard Divinity Grad has a keen ability to introduce the reader not only into to the plot of the story but also into the lives of the characters. Her main character Lily Connor is an Episcopalian priest who wearing jeans and cowboy boots shatters the stereotypical image of the "conservative" priest. In this story Lily embarkes on a quest of truth not only about her missing friend Anna but also her own spiritual life.

This is the second outing for Episcopalian priest, Lily Connor (the first being "The Tentmaker"). She is working on an event sponsored by the Holocaust remembrance committee when her good friend and holocaust survivor is kidnapped.

Upon investigation into the kidnapping, Lily finds that she doesn't know her friends as well as she first thought. She goes through some emotional turmoil as her beliefs are brought into question due to her perceived failings.

On the mystery side of the story, I enjoyed the fact that we are given many possible suspects and could decide for ourselves who we thought was the guilty party.

Lily Connor was born and raised as a Catholic, but left the church to become an Episcopalian minister. She is a tentmaker, earning a living outside the church and has no assigned church although the diocese would like her to serve in one. Her closest friend, Anna Baneta, watched the Nazis kill her parents for harboring Jews. Anna went to an orphanage and then to Auschwitz before immigrating to America.

Lily and Anna work for the ecumenical council sponsoring an event involving the Holocaust. When they arrive at the church to insure everything is ready for the worshippers, they find a Nazi flag and some vandalism. Anna thinks she knows who is behind the sacrilege and tells this to Lily before leaving to take a bus home. However, instead of reaching her destination, Anna vanishes, leaving Lily determined to find her.

EARTH HAS NO SORROW is a powerful work that does not preach, but questions some of the basic tenets of organized religion through Lily's crisis of faith. Readers feel her anguish, confusion, and sorrow over what she believes is a failure on her part. The complex mystery contains numerous feasible suspects, which makes for a difficult guess as to whom is the culprit. Michelle Blake uses a missing person's tale to focus on religion, but never decrees any judgment.

Harriet Klausner

Ms. Blake shows more comfort with her characters and plot in this interesting tale of the holocaust and religion in general. The plot is not actually religious, but Ms. Blake, again, uses religious issues and history to bind the plot and characters together very nicely.
I especially like the fact she is employing the pscyhic traits of Lily more and look forward to this "twist" in future novels.
Lily is a likeable and very human character, but it can be a bit depressing as she tends to not lighten up on herself. It would be nice to see less of this.

Not as good a book as her first, but still a "good read." I wish, as an Episcopalian, she had stayed within the Denomination rather than taking on the ultra-right wing of Roman Catholicism, though the story was exciting and she did not do so in a condemnatory manner. She is certainly correct in taking on the anti-Semitism which all Denominations have fallen into and are just now, for the most part, trying to get away from.

Julia Spencer-Fleming's two wonderful novels inspired me to seek out other ecclesiastical (yes, I used Spell-check on that one) heroines. Blake doesn't come close. I waded through the first, and have just given up entirely on the second, having gotten good and sick of the protagonist's negativity and whining. I don't require relentless optimism from my heroines, but honestly, who would want to spend time with someone this incessantly down in the dumps? And it's not as though she has a compelling-enough back-story to carry one along on a wave of sympathy. There's nothing for it but to keep waiting for Spencer-Fleming to finish her next novel - let us pray that this happens soon.

What a sad, slow, boring book! I couldn't care about any of the characters. A plodding book, with a rabbit out of the hat ending. Alot of nasty anti-Catholic bias throughout, which is ironic given the anti-Semitism plot line. One of the few books I've thrown away, but it was better than subjecting someone else to this misery.