Atonement Child

I read Francine Rivers' Atonement Child today. It is about a girl who is a freshman at a Christian College across the country from her childhood home. She is raped and conceives a child. Despite the fact that she is engaged to a future minister, a student at a Christian college and a child of Christians, everyone who is important to her either urges or accepts aborting the child. She however, can never bring herself to go through with the procedure and ends up bringing conversion to an abortionist and healing to her family.

I had mixed feelings about the book. I found it preachy, much more so than I have found most of her other Christian novels. I also found it predictable. On the other hand, I found it troubling, perhaps because I suspect there is truth there. All these God-loving people in her life were pushing her to have an abortion. Her college kicked her out, even though they knew she'd been raped, saying people would think she and her fiance had sinned, unless she was willing to publically state that she'd been raped. I have to wonder sometimes how many women end up in abortion clinics because of what they perceive as lack of support?