Redeeming Love
The best-selling Christian romance novel of all time. A retelling of the Book of Hosea set in Gold Rush California. Angel's journey from prostitution to the ability to receive love is narrated with genuine emotional power; Michael Hosea's relentless love for her is either infuriating or devastating depending on your temperament. Deeply felt.
Michael marries Angel while she is barely conscious, retrieves her each time she flees, and the book frames his persistence as God's own love. Read outside the theology, the romance runs on coercion; the heroine's resistance exists to be broken. Rivers retells Hosea faithfully, which is exactly the problem when the prophet's wife is a trafficked nineteenth-century prostitute.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
