UNCHARTED

Franklin, a pastor, delivers a memoir centering her Christianity.

The governing metaphor of the author’s nonfiction debut is a road map, used as a symbol for both trustworthy and unreliable navigation. Franklin likens the development of her faith to the unfolding of such a map, full of twists and turns and dead ends. She cautions her readers that God will not simply hand them a full itinerary: “We will not receive an exhaustive map that provides every detail or reveals each landmark and waypoint along our journey,” she writes. “If we did, there is a pretty good chance that we would either be terrified about what is to come or develop an ego-centeredness, and both scenarios would divert us from God’s ideal plan.” To illustrate the path of her own journey, Franklin draws heavily on her own life story from the perspective of “a Puerto Rican woman raised in financial poverty by a Roman Catholic family.” This narrative, she contends, “wildly messy as it is (you’ll see), has been used by God to illustrate the mystery.” The author reports that she “surrendered [her] life to Jesus” a month before her 40th birthday. Vignettes from her own religious history are liberally interspersed with Franklin’s more general theological musings, complete with a great many quotes drawn from Christian literature and Scripture.

Franklin writes with a good deal of empathy and heart. She snares the reader early in the book by describing her contemplation of suicide at the very young age of 7, after suffering some contentious encounters in her catechism class. What caused such a drastic reaction? Faulty cartography: “I was attempting to use my own map—my own interpretation of what was right and what was wrong, and how things should go,” she writes. “There was no room in my mind for any other human’s opinion or experience, much less God’s.” Her discussions of stories from Scripture are companionable and engaging, often highlighting the human contradictions in well-known tales. When mentioning the fact that certain countries and cultures don't let women preach the word of God, she cites other examples in Christian Scripture: “Nicodemus had the religious authority to talk about Jesus but didn’t,” she observes, “whereas the woman at the well, who had no authority, told everyone.” These piquant interpretations more than compensate for the author’s apparent misunderstanding of her own central conceit: “Maps are about what we want to happen or what we think will happen,” she writes, even though maps do not work that way (it becomes clear that “plans” would have been a better device than “maps” throughout). This along with a tendency for obscure faith-based pronouncements (“the way forward is not a formula but a relationship with Jesus cultivated by a rhythm of connection”) are the main weaknesses of a book otherwise brimming with personal honesty and cleareyed observations about religion.

An anecdotal personal account of one woman’s Christian walk of faith.