Today, I bring you fur­ther proof that a book should not be judged by its cover. I’m cur­rently read­ing Yucatan Deep by Tom Mor­risey. I don’t remem­ber where I picked the book up, but it was most likely at a thrift store or a used book shop. I do remem­ber that is was cheap (prob­a­bly no more than two dol­lars), and that I bought it because it seemed to involve a num­ber of things that inter­est me: cav­ing, div­ing, and pos­si­bly archae­ol­ogy. I’d never heard of the book or the author before, but I fig­ured that it would be good for a quick read, even if it was a fairly ter­ri­ble novel. Lit­tle did I know what I was in store for…

A cou­ple of days ago, when I was about sixty pages into the book, my mom e-mailed me, won­der­ing why I was read­ing an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian adven­ture novel. “A what?” I thought. I fig­ured that she must have looked at the Ama­zon page for the book, which is linked in the “Now Read­ing” sec­tion of my side­bar. I man­age my read­ing list with Media Man­ager, which auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ates the Ama­zon links. I gen­er­ally don’t visit the linked pages until I’m done with a book, if then. So, after get­ting the mes­sage from my mom, I checked Yucatan Deep on Ama­zon. This is how the “Edi­to­r­ial Reviews” sec­tion begins:

Cave div­ing is a rel­a­tively unusual topic for an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian adven­ture novel, and this debut novel by Mor­risey is chock-full of inter­est­ing char­ac­ters and cliff-hanging suspense…

Crap.

I had no idea that there was such a thing as an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian adven­ture novel, much less that I’d pur­chased one. The blurb on the back cover didn’t clue me in to the book’s true nature (it con­tains only a sin­gle pass­ing ref­er­ence to ‘faith’), nor did the first six­ty­ish pages lead me to believe I was read­ing any­thing other than a mediocre bit of escapist fiction.

On page eighty-five, it hit. There are three par­al­lel plots, one of which cen­ters on a young mechan­i­cal engi­neer and surfer, named Elvis, who has decided not to join his father’s respected surf­board busi­ness. We don’t find out what his new career path is until page eighty-five. Elvis has decided to become a mis­sion­ary and plans to min­is­ter to small Cen­tral Amer­i­can Indian tribes who have had lit­tle to no con­tact with out­siders. And he reads the Bible cover-to cover more than once per year. This book should not, as the back cover kindly sug­gests, be filed in FICTION/GENERAL/SUSPENSE.

I don’t mean to offend any of my Chris­t­ian friends, so I’ll just say that I’m not exactly the church-going type. I feel kind of tricked by the pub­lish­ers of this book, and I may not be able to read all the way through. I’ll let you know what I think if I man­age to fin­ish it (although, I’m at least ten books behind in post­ing reviews, so it may be awhile).