Kindness, acceptance, loyalty and finding love are themes woven through the story, I think. There is also a vein of spirituality buried just below the surface – with snippets of the old gospel songs the family used to sing constantly bubbling into Danny’s consciousness. He still clings to the hope that one day he’ll write a spiritual that is worthy of the genre. But the message is mixed. What does one do, for example, with Grease’s penchant for the raunchy, all those bloody fights and a kid who sells marijuana to save the family ministry?

Before I read the book, I read the cover. The description used words like “funny, poignant, revelatory, elegiac, luminous.” Phyllis Tickle’s endorsement said: "Danny Gospel is as compelling and engrossing a read as I have had lately….[It] will humble your heart and invite your soul to re-consider some of its assumptions.” This will be great, I thought.

But barely into the book I knew that if I weren’t reading to review, I would never have finished it. I went online to see what others were saying. There weren’t many reviews but the ones I found were equally positive. That’s when the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” came to mind. Could it be that no one had the nerve to say – this is nuts?

Or at any rate, and running the risk of sounding like a rube who must have even obvious jokes explained, I don’t get how it is all those wonderful things. Maybe I need a refresher course in symbology. All I can advise is read it and judge for yourself. Is it elegiac, luminous and assumption-changing or a completely improbable, albeit rollicking and sometimes entertaining-though-irrelevant dreamscape? Danny Gospel is scheduled to be released in April of 2008.