Seventeen and a half hours. That's how long Frank Peretti asks you to sit with a grieving widower magician who finds a teenage girl who is, impossibly, his dead wife. And I'll be honest - for the first three hours, I kept wanting to argue with the book.
Not because the premise is bad. The premise is actually kind of brilliant. But because Peretti takes his sweet time setting it up, and I'm sitting in the back row of a faculty meeting about standardized testing benchmarks, trying not to visibly react to a man describing his wife's car accident while Principal Martinez explains our new assessment rubric. (Sorry, Martinez. Again.)
Here's my complaint, and it's the same complaint I'd have with a student's creative writing submission: Peretti doesn't trust his reader enough. He's got this genuinely eerie concept - Dane Collins, professional illusionist, walks into a coffee shop and watches a nineteen-year-old girl perform tricks that defy everything he knows about stage magic. And she looks exactly like the woman he buried. That scene alone could carry a novel. But then Peretti keeps explaining. And explaining. The sci-fi machinery underneath the mystery - the interdimensional physics, the government surveillance apparatus - gets laid out with the patience of a textbook when what you want is the dread of not knowing.
When a Magician Tells You How the Trick Works Too Early
This is where Peretti's departure from his usual spiritual warfare territory both helps and hurts him. Readers who came expecting another This Present Darkness - angels and demons duking it out behind the scenes - are going to find something stranger. This is more psychological techno-thriller with genuine sci-fi DNA. The "who is watching Mandy" thread has real tension to it, and there's a scene where Mandy suddenly finds herself in a hospital gown in the middle of a park, disoriented, the world wrong around her like a waking nightmare, that genuinely unsettled me. That moment works because it's pure experience - no exposition, just fear and confusion.
But then we get twenty minutes of someone explaining the mechanism behind it, and the magic drains out like bathwater.
Let's talk about what Peretti is really saying here, though, because underneath the thriller scaffolding there's a love story that's sneakily moving. Dane is a man in his sixties watching a girl who carries his wife's mannerisms, her laugh, her instinct for performance - and he can't tell her. Their mentor-protégée dynamic walks this tightrope between tender and unsettling that I don't think Peretti gets enough credit for navigating. He's asking: what does it mean to love someone who doesn't remember loving you? That's not just a plot device. That's a question worth seventeen hours. I kept thinking about how Story of Joan of Arc wrestles with a similar kind of impossible identity — a person whose inner life doesn't map neatly onto what the world needs them to be — and how that tension is what makes both books linger after the story ends.
The Author Behind the Microphone
Now. Peretti narrates this himself, and the listener reviews are split, and I understand both sides. One reviewer nailed it: "Frank Peretti did a good job distinguishing the character's voices and his love for the characters comes through." That's exactly right. You can hear that this man cares about Dane and Mandy in a way that a hired narrator simply wouldn't. When Dane is processing his grief, Peretti's voice carries a weight that feels personal rather than performed.
But - and my students would call this a "big but" and then laugh because they're seventeen - it's not professional narration. The pacing is uneven. Some passages feel like Peretti is reading rather than inhabiting. If you're used to polished audiobook performances, this will feel like watching community theater after Broadway. Which, for the record, I think community theater has its own kind of honesty. But you should know what you're walking into.
I listened at 1.0x because the author chose those words and recorded them himself, and that deserves respect. But I'll admit the middle hours tested my commitment. Denise asked me on our Saturday lakefront walk why I kept making frustrated faces, and I had to explain that I was arguing with a fictional government agency's surveillance protocols.
Who This Is Actually For (And Who Should Walk Away)
If you loved Peretti's earlier work and want the same thing, pump the brakes. This isn't that. If you're interested in a Christian fiction author stretching into weird sci-fi territory with mixed but fascinating results, and you don't mind a book that's probably three hours longer than it needs to be, there's something genuinely special buried in here. The love story earns its ending. The mystery, when Peretti lets it breathe, actually works.
My students would hate this. Too slow, too much setup, not enough payoff per hour. But I teach teenagers who think The Great Gatsby is "mid," so their judgment is suspect.
The Grade I'd Write in Red Ink
B-minus. Strong concept, real emotional payoff, needed a tougher editor and a professional narrator. But that hospital gown scene in the park? That's A-plus writing. Peretti still knows how to make you feel like the ground has shifted under your feet. He just needs someone to tell him he doesn't have to explain the geology afterward.
