Book Review: Freehome

If I say “Space Western” and you get a little excited and have a vision of Malcolm Reynolds, then Freehome is a book you’ll want to add to your library. Freehome takes place on the colonized planet Tau Ceti where the original settlers (“the Rurals”) and the newer batch of settlers (“latecomers”, also “city folk”) are struggling to get along. The rurals are descendants of the original colonizers, most of whom set off into space as a chance to find freedom to practice their Christianity (think the Pilgrims). They rapidly learned to deal with the innate dangers of their new home and set up an agricultural community that is driven to help one another and is focused on living out their faith in practical ways. When the newcomers arrive, the rurals warned against their choice of settlement locations but were disregarded and the calamity that ensued sowed the seed for the resentment that is just starting to bubble over as the book begins.

At 417 pages, Freehome is long, but the pages turn quickly. The characters are all very well developed and there are enough twists in the plot that you don’t really have a good handle on all the whys of the conflict until the very end (this is a good thing – there’s nothing predictable about Freehome.)

The only slight negative is that there are, perhaps, just a few too many characters. They’re all necessary to the plot, but I had trouble keeping up with who was who in the various switches of perspective for the first 1/4 to maybe 1/2 as I worked to get a full understanding of what was going on. That said, once you get it set in your mind, the differing perspectives help make the story robust and it’s fascinating to see the story unfold from the different perspectives and motivations.

If you’ve been looking for well written Christian science fiction, you can’t go wrong with Freehome.