Repetition Repeated

 

Repetition is a good way to memorize or remember things. In both music and literature, it can also emphasize important features, create suspense, or heighten expectation. But too much of it becomes counterproductive.

I enjoy a good hymn even though the musical structure of each stanza is the same, and that also goes for hymns that have a chorus that repeats after every verse. But part of my enjoyment comes from keying in on the elements that aren’t repetitive, such as the different words in each stanza. I don’t enjoy contemporary music that simply repeats the same words and melody over and over. Repetition that is overdone tends to lose its impact.

Literature works the same way. Some repetition can be valuable, but too much simply bores me to death.

We all have different music and reading tastes, and not everybody feels the same way about repetition. Still, every writer should be aware of the effect his or her literary devices have on the reader.

Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers is one of the most boring books I have ever read. That’s my opinion, but the reviews say that many other readers don’t agree with me.

The premise of Redeeming Love is taken from the Bible book of Hosea, which says that no one is beyond redemption. In Hosea, God tells the prophet to marry a prostitute. After she leaves him for another man, God tells Hosea to go after her and bring her back home. There is repetition in that Hosea finds and marries Gomer once and then finds her again to redeem her, but the entire book of Hosea is eleven pages in my ESV Bible and it takes less than three of them to cover the story of Hosea and Gomer. The rest is dedicated to where the story points—to God’s desire to redeem Israel and Judah.

Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love, on the other hand, takes almost 500 pages to tell the story. I realize that good Biblical fiction enhances the story to develop the characters, setting, and plot, and if the book had been 300 pages, I might have been okay with it. Unfortunately, Redeeming Love tells an extremely repetitive story about an insipid heroine who goes through the same thing over and over again and doesn’t learn her lesson until the very end.

Repetition can aid memory or highlight important lessons, but there comes a point where it becomes counterproductive. The only lesson I got from Redeeming Love is to not read anything else by Francine Rivers.

And that’s not the lesson she intended to teach.