Redeeming Love Book Review

With the movie version of Redeeming Love coming out this week, I thought it would be a good time to review the book. 

I got this story for Christmas a couple years back from a dear friend, and it took me an insane amount of time to get around to reading it, but once I started, I couldn’t put it down. 

Here’s the blurb: 

California’s gold country, 1850. A time when men sold their souls for a bag of gold and women sold their bodies for a place to sleep. 

Angel expects nothing from men but betrayal. Sold into prostitution as a child, she survives by keeping her hatred alive. And what she hates most are the men who use her, leaving her empty and dead inside. 

Then she meets Michael Hosea. A man who seeks his Father’s heart in everything, Michael Hosea obeys God’s call to marry Angel and to love her unconditionally. Slowly, day by day, he defies Angel’s every bitter expectation until, despite her resistance her frozen heart begins to thaw. 

But with her unexpected softening come overwhelming feelings of unworthiness and fear. And so Angel runs. Back to the darkness, away from her husband’s pursuing love, terrified of the truth she can no longer deny: Her final healing must come from the One who loves her even more than Michael Hosea does…the One who will never let her go. 

A life-changing story of God’s unconditional, redemptive, all-consuming love.

My thoughts: 

I guess I’ll start the review off with a big old trigger warning—this book is dark. Don’t get me wrong, it’s done in a wonderful way, and even with the very explicit subject matter the author did a fantastic job of not making anything graphic for graphics sake. The book is not trashy at all. But it is dark. I had to back off a few times just because Angel’s bitterness and turmoil were so realistic it was hard to read. 

I don’t read a lot of adult fiction, or Christian fiction for that matter, so when I got hooked on the story it was a nice surprise. Angel is one of the most realistic characters I’ve ever seen in Christian fiction (small as my experience is). I loved that she was written angry and vengeful and petty and all the things, because it felt so real. So often books make the mistake of bringing the redemption arc full circle too soon, and that was not the case with Redeeming Love. I felt like the roller coaster of softening and then building her walls back up fit perfectly. 

I did struggle with Michael a bit. Ok, a lot. I wanted to throw something at his head through most of the book, because for all of his good intentions I felt like he was expecting way too much of Angel and not understanding why this would be so hard for her. But even that was good writing, because again, unlike most men in Christian fiction, he was not perfect. 

So the whole story is both of them working together and against each other to deal with the struggles in their lives, and it just worked really well. 

I did have a hard time with God talking directly to Michael, and maybe that’s just a personal pet peeve of mine, and I probably shouldn’t have expected anything different since this story is a literal retelling of the prophet Hosea’s story, but I just would have preferred there wasn’t direct back and forth communication going on, because it didn’t really fit the 1800s gold mining setting, in my opinion. 

But that’s a very small complaint, and like I said, just personal preference. 

So if all the movie hype has you curious about the book, I’d say it’s well worth the read, and I’m hoping to be able to see the movie soon too. Do you plan to?