The Book of Boy

Once, while serving as a missionary in Chile, I experienced a memorable moment of acute spiritual irony. I was on a 12 hour bus ride by myself, heading to pick up a new companion. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was playing on the bus television. I had spent the last 9 months preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, inviting others to come unto Him through faith and repentance and baptism. I had taught the importance of living a Christ-like life by heeding Christ's teachings and showing Christlike love to everyone. I truly believed (and still do) that doing this is the key to happiness in this life and eternal life in the life to come. As I tuned in and out of the movie, I realized that Indiana, his dad, the Nazis and everyone else in the movie were also on a quest for immortality (via the Holy Grail). And they were killing, backstabbing, deceiving, stealing and sleeping with women in an effort to achieve it. The irony of their pursuit struck me suddenly. They were doing the exact opposite of what would actually help them obtain eternal life in an effort to achieve it.


I experienced a similar feeling while reading The Book of Boy. Segundus the pilgrim is in search of seven relics that will get him to paradise. So he steals and deceives to get these bones of St. Peter that will save him. The one 'saving grace' of The Last Crusade's irony is that none of the characters actually achieves eternal life by doing evil things (not even Indy). But Segundus actually does! Thankfully, he's not nearly as depraved as the characters in Indiana Jones and actually has some lovely, redeeming moments where it's clear he has repented of the evil he committed in his life and learned to show love to the weak and friendless. But I wanted THAT to save him, not some dumb 1300 year old rib bone he steals. Okay. Spiritual rant over.

I loved Boy from the very first page. He's so good and innocent and keen. I'm not going to lie; it was super weird when we discover he's an angel. I made guesses about his secret for most of the book but I did NOT see that coming. I guess my big question is: What's the point of being an angel if you don't know you are one? Where the heck did he come from and why is he here if he isn't given any knowledge beforehand? I guess my understanding of angels is completely different than Catherine Murdock's. And so is my understanding of how one gets to heaven.

Cognitive dissonance aside, it was still a good read.

The Night Diary

Sometimes it surprises me how little I know about the world. Like, that I really had no idea that Pakistan only became a country when India gained independence from Great Britain and the country was split in two?! I had never even heard of the conflict, in fact. Is that part of K-12 history curriculum? I am so ignorant. One of the reviews on the back of The Night Diary claims it is set in a time "little known to American children" which made me feel a little better, but then again, I'm definitely not a child. It's a good thing Veera wrote a Newbery-honor-winning novel about the "Partition" or I may have continued in ignorance forever.

The Night Diary is a lovely book. There's plenty of peril and injustice and frustrating family silence, but it does all seem to resolve nicely by the end. Nisha's family becomes stronger and closer, she becomes wiser and kinder, her father becomes softer. The conflict itself, of course (ha! as if I even knew this conflict existed 12 hours ago), does not resolve nicely, but it is a relief that the fictional book family comes out alive and happy-ish.

One Not Very Important Note: The book is written as a series of journal entries by Nisha addressed to her mother (who died while giving birth to her and her twin Amil). Toward the beginning of the book, I was being hypercritical of the believe-ability of her entries (there's no way a 12-year-old could or would have written that much in a single day's journal entry; she would not have written a journal entry that poetically; there's no way she remembered that conversation verbatim), but by the end I was so caught up in the story, I hardly noticed they were journal entries. I think that's a good thing.