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Apr 09, 2019NADINE KEELS rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
After eating up A.D. 30, I was anxious to find out right away what would happen next to the characters. I started and stuck with A.D. 33 to find out. But unfortunately, around a third or halfway into the read, I stopped enjoying it, with its one miserable turn of events after another. In the midst of the constant and compounding gloom and despair, Maviah becomes an increasingly frustrating character—lashing out, being irrational, and regressing. It's as if her growth from the first book is erased, and it takes her the length of the sequel to learn the same basic lesson another time around. Although Yeshua goes off-script a bit more in this novel than in the first one, he's still much of the same "Jesus character" cliché, like more of a prescribed figure than a real person, and his expressions and actions are described as "gentle" over and over again—even as many as five times in one particular scene. Also, much of the book's scriptural and spiritual content is superfluous. The pages and pages of theological exposition and discussions seem to go around in circles, stalling the story to teach and reteach a message when the idea could have gotten across with more "showing," or at least much less "telling." At this point in my bibliophilic life, I normally wouldn't keep pushing through a rather depressing and redundant read I'm no longer enjoying (especially one as long as this one), but my carried-over interest in the characters from Book One and my overall curiosity about their outcome made me determined to finish. I understand the A.D. novels are a departure from Dekker's usual work. Because these are the only two books I've read by him so far, and I loved the first one, it's my plan to try something else of his sometime.