The Begotten by Lisa T. Bergren

So another Bzz Agent thing I'm on is with the Penguin Publishing group and I was given an excerpt for the book listed in the title of this entry. The brief intro to the book given by Penguin is that the author wrote the book because she thought the Da Vinci Code was too heretical so she sought to create a page-turner that was more "scripturally sound". I'm not suer she succeeded. The novel is set in Italy and first starts in 700ish AD Constantinople and then jumps to 1300ish AD Italy and is full of evil wizards performing black arts and saintly healers protecting the innocent. I'm a big sci-fi/fasntasy buff and it was surprising to see the elements of magic and healing in a Christian context. If this were set in some mytical place I wouldn't have given it a second thought, but applying it this way is clever. It did get me thinking about how a lot of fantasy writers incorporate magic into their works but as soon as you put healing in a Chritian context in a work it smacks of a religiosity that might turn some people on or off depending on their inclinations. The excerpt reads like many fantasy novels I've read and certainly begins like one. I'm uncertain where its intending to go, but I expect it will likely end like many of thee fantasy novels I have read, with the twist that as this book is set in supposedly our Universe, we know how its supposed to end.