Saturday, November 26, 2011

Review of In Plain Sight

I had to read this book by Marlayne Giron. First of all, I love the title and the premise: Two outer space aliens hide among the Amish while their invisible space ship gets repaired. And when I read the book, I found only two typos in the whole thing (has/had substitutions) so this has been incredibly well edited. The description of daily Amish life was thorough and quite exhausting. As I read about their daily work, I felt the same as I did when I read a book about how to survive when The World As We Know It ends under a massive EMP pulse: I do NOT want to become a subsistance farmer. A lot of it is laziness on my part, but I also have incredibly low stamina (only work a few hours before collapse) due to allergies and diabetes and who knows what else. Maybe fibromyalgia, certainly arthritis. Growing food is fun until I will starve if I don't.
So I liked the aliens, and I liked the Amish. What I did not like was the Romance. Well, duh, on me. It is marketed as romance. It is not the author's fault that romance makes me want to gag. I wanted to shake the girl and yell, "You don't even know this boy!!! What you do know is he keeps crossing boundaries! You can have sex only so many times a day, and then what? You don't know his family and culture and customs and language and world and climate and work. You don't know if you can live with him outside of smoochies!" But that's just me.
The ending was satisfying. If you can stand romance, if you find the Amish interesting, if you like speculation about aliens and theology, you are going to love this book.
Now I wonder what Marlayne Giron will think of my book about Amish imitators on another planet.

3 comments:

  1. Why do people (and aliens, apparently) always hide out with the Amish? Was that explained?

    Tim Allen and Kirstie Alley in "For Richer for Poorer"

    Woody Harrelson in "Kingpin"

    Harrison Ford in "The Witness"

    Now this?? There MUST be something to it. Does the book cover that?

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  2. So true, Lelia! Sometimes the goo factor in Christian romances are incredibly naive. I would almost say dangerous.

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  3. You'll have to ask Marlayne Giron about that.

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