Until My Name Is Known by Sonya Contreras

About the book:

Until My Name Is Known (Bull Head Press, July 2015)

The Exodus of the Jews from Egypt is a love story between God and His people. God woos His people to Himself as He prepares them to leave. Before leaving, God must fight Pharaoh for possession of His people. See how God changes all people: some for the better, others not. None stay the same. How will He change you? Can you trust a God who destroyed a nation before your eyes? Would you want Him as your Friend?

See God free His people from Egypt’s bonds before a watching world. Trace His finger in the lives He touches. The time: 2450 BC. The Place: Old Kingdom of Egypt where Pharaoh is god. His people worship him. Israel’s God arrives. He challenges Pharaoh. His power touches all people. They must change. Some do not concede. They suffer. Others yield. They find freedom.

Until My Name Is Known brings all to see the one true God. Read it to see Him. Today’s historians and archaeologists puzzle over the fall of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, but the world at that time heard of God. The world knew that He is the Lord. His Name was proclaimed in all the earth.

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About the author:

Growing up with five sisters, Sonya Contreras asked God many questions, even when she did not like His answers. Graduating from Cedarville University and Institute for Creation Research with a Masters Degree in Science Education did not stop her questions. Marrying her best friend and homeschooling their eight sons, she found that dreams do come true, in spite of unanswered questions. Trusting God, who knows all answers, she shares questions that matter weekly at sonyacontreras.com.

Find Sonya online: website, Twitter

Margie’s Comments: 

Until My Name Is Known by Sonya Contreras is a well-researched biblical fiction, retelling the story of Moses’s call to set God’s people free from slavery in Egypt. The events of this first book in a series covers the burning bush through the crossing of the Red Sea and the Egyptian nation’s destruction when the water closed over the army following the Israelites. While the story is historically accurate, I had trouble getting into it because of the author’s lack of sentence structure variation, which is an indication of telling rather than showing. Also, several times through the book, I questioned the choice of POV character. For example, instead of experiencing the burning bush through Moses’s eyes and ears, we read of it after the fact through Zipporah’s extreme bias against her husband’s God. Instead of making the characters come alive and be “real,” these POV choices in most cases made them wooden and static. Finally, as a Christian and a strong proponent of God’s Word and its importance in the life of the believer, I like to see a strong spiritual thread in fiction. But it needs to be such an integral part of the story that it flows naturally out of the characters themselves. I don’t need to be hit over the head with the “theme” over and over again. In Until My Name Is Known, the theme of God's name being known throughout the world is inherent in the biblical story and in Moses's life, so having it spelled out for the reader, even to the very end, is redundant and frankly insults the reader's intelligence. As a freelance editor who has worked for several traditional CBA publishers, i couldn't help noticing several technical issues with the typesetting, mostly with word breaks and capitalization choices that could easily have been avoided by checking with the industry-standard dictionary and style manuals. However, once I acknowledged these deterrents to reading the story for enjoyment, I was able to skim through the book, appreciating the author's research and how she wove it into a fictional account that is accurate to the Scripture and the time in history.