Beneath a Navajo Moon

• Beneath a Navajo Moon by Lisa Carter on Amazon

What a gorgeous cover, and it even wraps around to the back of the book! Beneath A Navajo Moon is a novel in the Abingdon Press Abington Fiction – "a novel approach to faith" – series, so I expected the story to include a spiritual slant and some explicitly Christian details. Abingdon is an imprint of the United Methodist Publishing House, and the UMC is a mainline church body, yet I wasn't surprised to find Lisa Carter's book more in the conservative evangelical category than in the liberal mainline.

From the start, Carter nicely delineates flashbacks about Olivia, a white missionary and the original subject of central figure southerner North Carolinian Erin's visit to the Navajo rez for her cultural anthropology grad school research. in fact, we get several pieces of Olivia back story starting with the turn of the 20th century and into the middle of that century.

With my love of and familiarity with the southwestern desert, I enjoyed the author's fictitious northern Arizona Cedar Canyon locale where most of the action happens. I know very few details about Navajo culture, though I'm aware Arizona has more Native Indian-owned land than any other state. I also have enough knowledge of a raped and plundered land, a subjugated people and the subsequent hatred and contempt many native Peoples have for their oppressors to understand the White-Native People irresolution and conflict in this novel.

My feelings about Beneath A Navajo Moon are very mixed. Erin is an adopted daughter of sometimes foreign missionaries who has lived in several different cultures. We get typical evangelical missionary stereotypes of White Protestants thinking they need to help save Unreached People Groups. Indigenous People Cedar Canyon Community Church Pastor Johnny is no big cultural surprise, either. We find the necessity of Erin marrying a true believer who has given his life to Jesus. We get redemption by blood in the context of native practices and Christian convictions. Interesting vignette of Adam drawing his own blood in the unfinished initiation ceremony toward the book's end and then finally his giving his life to Jesus in order to claim his true redemption via Jesus' shed blood – "not with blood of goats or heifers" – as we read in the letter to the Hebrews the book sometimes cites. Erin and her romantic native American interest Adam are the most clearly drawn characters.

Apparently Carter has not been writing all that seriously for all that long, and though she writes fairly well, she seems like an author to keep following, since I expect her writing to keep getting better and better. I like the two dozen "Discussion Questions" at the end. I wouldn't necessarily consider Beneath a Navajo Moon for a reading club, but anyone who has read the book might want to consider some of their own experiences and convictions in light of the book's narrative.

• My Amazon Review: anthropology, religion, romance…