ARAM will be on a summer-time sale for $0.99

We’ve just finished a read-aloud and are hoping its sequel will soon be published! Aram is A.K. Frailey’s inside story of a fictional tribal culture whose leaders and members must face fearful realities – internal and external, imagined and real – as they carry on typical human lives of family interaction and metaphysical questioning. Frailey’s characters are complex and varied – no cardboard cut-out Good Guys and Bad Guys here, but no attempt to render right and wrong ambiguous or iffy.

Our favorite scene (must tell without spoiling it for you) was one in which we saw a threat approaching in one character’s duplicity, but instead of seeing The Clues given to point us to that awareness, we lived the experience of mounting tension in a less simplistic and cerebral way. I had to go back over that chapter, wondering at how the author had accomplished such a great carrying of her readers right into the lived experience of danger without leaving a trace. I must bow to her writing skills, because it was simply magic!

I have a particular dislike (a la Flannery O’Connor) of fiction that is a vehicle for `truth’ without being true. With trepidation I opened this book, but with delight and joy I read it aloud – anxious to get back and see what happened whenever we had to take a break. I very much appreciated the deep spiritual insights that Frailey wove in, and this chance to share them with my children. It’s a much harder task than I could manage to tell realistically a story of a pre-Christian people, to avoid sermonizing, but also to treat truthfully their very human, very real need to find out about the God who made them and the way to please Him.