by Paige Lewis
First sentence: “On the day God arrived with His Big Mission, He found Yara preparing to leap, fully clothed, into the Spring River.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Release date: May 19, 2026
Content: There is reference to sexual assault, some swearing, including f-bombs, and lots of violence. It will be in the Fiction section of the bookstore.
This is a hard one to describe. It’s an Epic Story, the story of a Final Battle and a Quest to stop it, of Discovery and of God and Humanity. There is a plot: there’s a Bad Guy and Yara is tasked by God to kill him. They go on a journey to get there – and the journey is the point. There is also a Prophet, Adrena, who wants to be a part of the Battle and goes on her own Journey to reach the end.
It’s a Lot of a book. I really liked it at first – there’s a lot of humor (the whale named HOWBIG is quite amusing) and just a lot of the over-the-top-ness of it all. But, I think this is meant to be read quickly (and it goes fast, despite its length), because I put it down for a couple of days, and it lost momentum. I thought it kind of lost direction near the end (but it may be that I missed the satire of it all); it wasn’t as satisfying as I was hoping it would be.
That said, it was unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and I think Lewis is a brilliant writer. It’s worth reading for the experience of reading it.
