Kristen Kooistra's Reviews > Firebird

Overall 3.5 stars.

This detail was VERY important for me, but I wish it'd been revealed at the beginning of the book not after.

This book is based on the idea of what if Christ hadn't come yet and the Israelites had gone on waiting for another 3k years. This is not an allegory.

I saw "Christian Sci-fi" and assumed it'd either be an allegory or "the future if the time up to our present remained the same". This left me a bit confused at times as the MMC talks about the Savior being expected to come one day from a certain family line(Judah).

Most of the terminology is not what it is today, so the Israelites have become "Jedi"(can't recall the name they use, but they're force powered, mind-reading, object-lifting, lightsaber wielding, people). Different names for the Messiah and so on.

It took me awhile to adjust to all the terminology and names. New solar system with new ruling powers, new planets, people, cities, etc. Trying to remember what was what took some time.

But I kept thinking, "How is this Christian and not Jewish if the people of this society are still waiting for the Messiah?" The note at the end of the book explained it was a "what-if Christ hadn't come for another 3k years" thing.

Totally changed how I saw the book in retrospect.

A dense book in a lot of ways(a lot to absorb). This is kind of like a Ruth/Rahab story in the future where a woman leaves her people and learns the way of the Israelites(and you can figure out the rest).

The characters were fully developed and the plot was just wow. The idea that the Israelites had gotten restless and given themselves powers which almost destroyed their "new" homeland and caused them to be cursed to not share their faith unless directly asked was a new one.

Overall, despite that obvious similarities to the Jedi(and I don't think SW should have exclusive rights to an idea like the Jedi), this was very original. I'd never seen an idea like this one and the depth and detail to both the Federate society and Firebird's was amazing.

I mean, we have a culture that doesn't allow any nobility to have more than 4 people lined up for the posistion(in Firebird's case, the throne). So the minute you get bumped down to #5, you are told to kill yourself or they'll kill you!

But there's this whole ritual to the mess. Expensive education goes into these "wastling" so that when they kill themselves it'll bring honor to the planet. It was so messed up, but the people BELIEVED in this and I thought it was handled in such a way that I could see how someone indoctrinated like that could believe it.

If I'd known that it was a "what if" story and not an allegory from the beginning, it probably would've gone to 4 stars(As I would've been less distracted with "what's going on!" while reading). And then I docked 1 star for a combination of it was hard to get all the new "words/names" straight and sink my teeth into the world at first and I felt like the ending was unsatisfactory(and book 2 starts off quite a time afterwards it seems).

I'll be reading the second book for sure.