Sydney Hiebert's Reviews > Twice Freed

This book was a slog, partially because it’s quite a daunting task to reenact and interpret real events through the prose of historical fiction. It takes a lot of research but can’t bog down; the dialogue has to be authentic but not too dense; and the plot has to balance historical accuracy with believable embellishment. I think St. John missed the mark here. Anytime a passage of scripture is quoted, it’s done in a very KJV way, lots of thees and thous that immediately distract and suck you away from the historical period she’s trying to set up. Also, she had trouble settling on a narrator perspective. For chapters and chapters we’d have Onesimus’ third-person limited perspective, then out of nowhere, we’d receive some third-person omniscient perspective from other minor characters. It would’ve been more interesting to limit that so scenes could be interpreted through Onesimus’ biases.