“Oceans Apart” by Karen Kinsgbury

Christian writer Karen Kingsbury is a brand. Well, actually, she’s more than a brand; she’s a veritable writing industry. She’s written more than 100 Christian-themed novels, children’s books, and non-fiction works. She’s been a #1 author on The New York Times bestsellers list numerous times. Her books typically become bestsellers before they’re published.

I had previously read only two of her novels, Every Now and Then and Unlocked. I don’t usually read “branded” novelists, but I did enjoy both of these books. I hadn’t read one of Kingsbury’s books in more than five years, until I saw one, Oceans Apart, advertised at a discounted price, checked the summary on Amazon, and decided to give it a go. I knew it would likely be high in sentimentally, somewhat following a familiar formula, and generally have a happy ending.

I bought it and started the first chapter to see if I would like it. I kept reading. I skipped my nap, and my wife will tell you how significant that is. I finished the book three hours later. You could say I inhaled it.

Kiahna Seifert is a flight attendant based in Hawaii. She’s doing the work flight attendants do when they getting passengers ready for a flight from Honolulu to Tokyo, a trip she’s made dozens of times. But she’s distracted, feeling an odd disquiet she can’t explain. The plane takes off, and shortly later begins a spiraling descent into the ocean. Her last thoughts are of her 8-year-old son Max. The plane crashes into the ocean, and there are no survivors.

Half a planet away, Florida-based pilot Connor Evans is getting ready for his own flight. Connor is happily married to Michelle, and deeply loves her and their two pre-teen daughters. He does have family problems; he hasn’t spoken to his father in more than a decade, with plenty of anger from both men.

Connor hears about the plane crash near Hawaii, and he checks the list of passengers and crews. He sees Kiahna’s name, and while he’s saddened, he’s also relieved. Only once was he ever unfaithful to Michelle, during a period when he was struggling with the aftermath of the break with his father, his career was on the line with an FAA investigation, and Michelle had been dealing with depression and wanted nothing to do with him or their little girl and new baby. Connor had had a one-night stand with a flight attendant in Honolulu, both dealing with a storm-closed airport and no place to stay. And now the one person who knew about the brief affair was dead.

Karen Kingsbury

Except Connor is going to find out about the son he never knew about, and Michelle will learn that had husband had been unfaithful.

It’s a fast-paced story, easy to read (and easy to inhale). And you keep reading to find out what’s going to happen, and what’s going to happen next. And you know that Connor is going to be forced to make a choice he doesn’t want to make.

Oceans Apart should come with a warning label: “Danger! This book is addictive. Read only when you know you have the time to read it straight through.”

Related:

My review of Karen Kingsbury’s Every Now and Then.

My review of Karen Kingsbury’s Unlocked.

Top photograph by Anna Popovic via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Karen Kingsbury's "Unlocked"

People in publishing circles call Karen Kingsbury a brand. That’s likely an understatement. Virtually everything she publishes hits the best-seller list. No, this is not “literary fiction” we’re talking about here. But she doesn’t make that claim. Instead, her novels are popular fiction that are anticipated, read and valued by her readers (there are more than 600 reviews of her latest novel on Amazon).

The simple truth of the matter is, Kingsbury knows how to write a good, engaging story. I read Unlocked in less than a day.

It’s the story of Holden Harris, an autistic teen mainstreamed into a suburban Atlanta high school, and Ella Reynolds, a school cheerleader who is being chased by the football team quarterback and is looking forward to an amazing senior year. Her life intersects with Holden’s, and then she learns that the two of them and their families actually have a past. And the superficial life of high school popularity begins to give way to something else altogether, as Ella becomes the key that might unlock Holden’s mind.

In Unlocked, Kingsbury tackles a number of issues: autism; the pressures of sports celebrity life; bullying in schools; teen suicide; walking away from faith. She handles all of them well, and the scenes of Holden’s autism manifesting itself and what is actually going on in his mind are drawn well and true. If there is any criticism here, it’s that, even with some disclaimers, Kingsbury veers too close to the vaccine-origin-theory of autism, the major medical study for which was just last week determined to be “fraudulent.”

But that’s a minor point. The story reads well and fast; the characters are drawn well and sympathetically. That the reader comes to identify so strongly with Holden is no small feat on Kingsbury’s part. And one learns a lot about autism, and what it is and isn’t.

Unlocked is characteristic of Kingsbury’s work and explains much about here success as a novelist. It’s accessible and readable; the story is familiar because we all know people just like those in the novel; and she deals with issues on a real rather than sentimental level.

In short, it’s a very good read.

Karen Kingsbury's "Every Now and Then"

ATTENTION FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION: No one gave me this book. I bought it myself, with my own money, at a Barnes & Noble Bookstore in a suburb of St. Louis. I even have the receipt. I have received no compensation for this blog post, nor do I expect to. So, if in your infinite wisdom you would hold book reviewers in the traditional media to the same rules on book reviews that you’ve got now for bloggers, then we could all be unhappy and outraged together. But at least it would be fair. I don't don't have a problem with transparency, even mandated transparency, but I do have a problem when you set rules for one group but not another doing the same thing.

If you haven't followed the news on the new FTC rules, suffice it to say that the FTC is now requiring blogger "endorsers" to disclose whether they received any kind of compensation at all, including a free book to review. I don't have a problem with that. But I don't really see a difference between a book review on a blog and a book review in the newspaper. Ths may shock people, but 99.99% of newspapers and magazines don't buy the books they review. The books come (gasp!) free from the publishers. And there's no disclosure.

Okay, that’s off my chest.

I’m not much into “branded” authors. You know, the ones whose name on a book cover magically makes the books fly off the bookstore shelves and the aisles in Amazon’s warehouses into consumers’ hands. The ones whose books are in the top 10 on Amazon’s list months before they’re published. There are the secular fiction brands like John Grisham, James Patterson and Stephanie Meyer, not to mention Don Brown, and there are the Christian fiction brands like Jerry Jenkins, Beverly Lewis, B.J. Hoff, and Terri Blackstock. And, if we were all honest with ourselves, every wannabe published writer secretly desires to achieve brand status. Alas, only a few every make it, but that's the appeal. That, and the money.

I don’t usually read the branded authors. No particular reason or bias, I just find myself interested in other kinds of writing. Usually. Last year, I picked up one branded author’s book because it looked interesting, but I was disappointed. It just wasn’t written very well. Others he had done were better written, but this one was, well, just off. Leave it at that. Everyone has a bad day sometimes.

So here I was at that bookstore mentioned above in my FTC rant, looking for some interesting things to read in Christian fiction, and came to the Karen Kingsbury section.

Karen Kingsbury is a brand. She’s written a lot of books. She gets her own section of shelves – three of them, in fact – at Barnes & Noble. That amount of space at Barnes & Noble is for brands – authors who sell lots of books. But hey, this is a business, and the brands make a lot of money for booksellers and publishers, and if Karen Kingsbury helps Barnes & Noble stay in business then she deserves three shelves.

I almost went on to another section, but heard this little voice in my head saying "Snob! You're biased and probably jealous, and acting literary doesn't fool me!" So I stopped and looked through the Kingsbury books, and found one (there were others) that looked appealing. It was called Every Now and Then and was part of Kingsbury’s 9/11 series of books based on the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in 2001. This book is set several years later (it was published in 2008), and it’s about Alex Brady, a young K-9 officer in southern California whose fireman father died in the collapse of the Twin Towers. Alex has neither forgotten nor forgiven, and he has become almost like a machine in seeking to eradicate evil from the streets.

Okay, I thought, it’s part of a series. The author has written some 50 books or so. It’s probably OK, not great but OK. The story idea sounds interesting. And, and I’m being candid here, the bad guys were environmentalists, of the radical, destructive variety, the fringe types who set off bombs and set fires to protect the environment from humanity even if they have to destroy humanity to do that. Being in business, and watching how movies and TV programs and novels always, always demonize business people, this promised to be at least different. As in refreshing.

It was more than different. I underestimated Kingsbury. Every Now and Then is a good story, and it’s told well. The book required a lot of research, and she did it, and it’s believable and credible and makes the story come alive. And the appeal is both to women and men; in fact, this story may more appeal to a male audience because it’s action-packed and suspenseful and it’s good versus evil and the dialogue is mostly guys talking to guys and it’s got a raging fire and people getting shot. Well, you get the picture. Sure, there’s some romance in it, but it fits the story and isn’t the heart of what the story’s about. It’s a great read.

So I learned something. And that is, the “brands” can deliver just as good a story as anyone else. It's not just about being a brand. I don’t know what the rest of her writing is like, but Karen Kingsbury’s Every Now and Then is a satisfying read. The lady knows how to write, she knows how to tell a good story, and she delivers.