Believe in creation but don't think it's important whether a Christian believes the days of Genesis 1 are literal 24-hour days.

Jane Hugh works and loves being in the animal sanctuary. She has a steady man in her life, she seems to be happy. Believe in young-earth creation but need to read clearly-written arguments to help you make a better case for your position. I snapped up this book without even looking at the synopsis as I enjoyed this authors début novel so much. Pretty smart decision by me as this one was even darker and had a sinister setting that gave me all the creeps that I expect from a psychological thriller!From 1987 to 1993, Ham worked for the Institute for Creation Research, and in 1994 set up what in 1995 became Answers in Genesis (AiG), a creation ministry dedicated to "upholding the authority of the Bible from the very first verse." Rated 1 star for fear-mongering, conspiracy theorizing, repetitiveness, naivete, and disturbing authoritarian overtones. Thank you to Kathryn Croft, Bookouture, and NetGalley for a complimentary copy. All opinions are my own. I have to say I am not keen on plots involving anything resembling a cult, and this lessened my enjoyment of The Lie. This is a personal dislike and not something that should dissuade readers without that opinion from reading the book. Each chapter opens with a sentence or paragraph from what appears to be some sort of military manual, mostly pertaining to how the men should behave under war conditions. I expected these would relate in some way to the rest of the chapter, but I usually forgot all about them as I immersed myself in the actual story.

The novel is told from the first person perspective of Daniel Branwell, a young man who has returned from France after a stint in the Army. His narrative voice from the start is not a realistic male one, and it certainly sounds far too feminine to be anything close to plausible at times. Both of Daniel’s parents are dead, and his only company is an elderly woman named Mary Pascoe who lives nearby -‘Even with her milky eyes she still seemed more like a bird than a woman… I was glad that the humanness in her seemed to have been parched away, so that she was light enough to fly’ – and his memories.

I lost some respect for the plot at this point, it really seemed to get very far-fetched, entertaining but at times boring also, so hard to express how I felt. It was like someone else wrote the middle of the book. Whilst it was intense, for me it seemed quite disjointed. I could not understand what the women were thinking! I do wish he had gone into even more detail about the arguments used to mesh evolution and creation. It seems like a simple enough argument to me that if you believe (as the Bible states) that death did not enter the world until Adam sinned, then how can a fossil record that is nothing but death prove that millions of years have gone by? The first few chapters of Genesis are very clear about the ages and timelines that follow Adam and his descendents. But clearly there are many, many preachers and teachers bent on holding on to unbiblical ideas that complicate the issue.