The Longest Day by Terry Toler 

This is a strange book. It won Best Book Award for Religious Fiction in 2020 from American Book Fest. It’s about redemption but seems to be in reverse. The first half of the book covers one day. The second half is many years later and covers a longer timeframe.  

Adam Lang is an astronaut who is going to go into what is called the Stream and travel faster than the speed of light to a planet far away that NASA has discovered. His daughter, Jamie Austen is the same Jamie Austen that has her own series after this. In this book, she’s a college student, but later becomes a spy. The first part of the book is Jamie trying to get to her father before he leaves earth. I’ll leave the why to the reader to discover. The second half is Adam’s space trip.

To me, this book was a comedy of errors. I’m not sure if that was Mr. Toler’s intention. It’s a tragedy in which the main characters, Adam and Jamie, make one bad decision after another. It is book one of an eight book series, so maybe there is redemption for Adam eventually.

The writing is okay. The story in this first book is predictable. As soon as Adam lands on a particular planet, what will happen isn’t that hard to figure out, especially if the reader has a Biblical background. It is an interesting twist on the fall of man. Some of the science is questionable, so if you’re a hardcore science fiction reader, you’ll have to look past that.

Being a Christian novel, it’s clean. No profanity, no sex, and the violence is muted. And only a little violence, anyway. I struggled to like Adam. He’s paranoid, a social outcast, and, as mentioned earlier, makes bad decision after bad decision. I liked Jamie Austen much better in Save the Girls (link is to my review of this book), her first spy thriller. With Mr. Toler, I’ll stick with the Jamie Austen series and the Cliffhanger series. I will probably not dip back into this series.

I’ll rank this one ten out of the eleven I’ve read so far. Not a bad book, just not that satisfying and a little strange.

1. Love’s True Calling by Lori DeJong
2. Through Thorny Ways by Jennifer Q. Hunt
3. The Seven Day Resurrection by Chevron Ross
4. Justice by Jeff Hill
5. Already in the Kudzu by Hannah Hood Lucero
6. The Misadventures of Itchy Izzy by N.Y. Dunlap
7. Ranch Showdown by Tina Wheeler
8. The Shocking Truth by Steve Rush
9. Daughter of Darkness by Ed Gorman
10. The Longest Day by Terry Toler
11. Left to Die by Lisa Jackson

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