The Sinful Life of Lucy BurnsTHE SINFUL LIFE OF LUCY BURNS by Eliz­a­beth Leik­nes is a moral­ity tale mixed with social satire that speaks of the power of words, thoughts and deeds. The hero­ine, Lucy Burns, nar­rates the story and she doesn’t waste time catch­ing read­ers up. No. You’re pretty much sucked into Lucy’s extra­or­di­nary life and what a life it is.

Lucy Burns hates her job. She’s a facil­i­ta­tor for the Boss down below. Yeah, Him. She’s respon­si­ble for guid­ing sin­ners to meet their early demise. A weary task. Work­ing for the devil does have it’s perks — age­less beauty and immor­tal­ity — but Lucy’s had enough.

By address­ing a let­ter to “Whom This May Con­cern” at age 11, Lucy asks that her sis­ter Ellen’s life be spared after she was seri­ously injured in a car acci­dent. In exchange for her sister’s life, Lucy finds her­self mis­led and ensnared into a life of servi­tude that comes with a no strings attached type relationships.

Well, Lucy wants her life back. She learns there’s a loop­hole where the level of dif­fi­culty proves to be a test of faith. In between cor­ralling sin­ners and lead­ing them to her base­ment, Lucy falls in love. Her love inter­est, Luke Mar­shall, is sexy as hell. No pun intended. He’s a pro­fes­sor of Cre­ative Writ­ing who is also — blind. With that said, I will leave the rest of the plot details unsaid.

THE SINFUL LIFE OF LUCY BURNS was a lot of fun to read. Admit­tedly, it took awhile for me to get ori­ented because like I said, the story doesn’t catch you up until a bit later. But I was hooked into the story once it got going. Not being a fan of flash­backs, they were well done in here and as some­one else said, they are clev­erly used in the story and not heavy handed at all.

There’s a lot of social and cul­tural satire in here which led to a lot of laugh out loud moments. This book was FUN for lack of a bet­ter descrip­tion. Like a breath of fresh air type of fun. I’m grate­ful to have had the oppor­tu­nity to read this book and hope oth­ers will do the same. This book is very read­able.

No book is ever per­fect. I had some issues start­ing with Lucy’s non-blasé atti­tude about the lives she was con­demn­ing to Hell but when seen from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, hey, she’s been doing this job for years. I wanted more romance but this is not a romance novel. So you see, my crit­i­cisms have more to do with me than with the writ­ing per se.

The author’s voice/style espe­cially her humor — worked for me, because it’s hard to make me laugh.

Love has always been the strongest moti­va­tor. It made Orpheus gaze at and sub­se­quently destroy Eury­dice. It made Bon­nie aid and abet Clyde. Actu­ally, that’s a bad exam­ple — she liked shoot­ing peo­ple as much as he did. It made Whit­ney [Hous­ton] believe in Bobby [Brown’s] pre­rog­a­tives. It made Hillary avoid cas­trat­ing Bill –oops, another bad example.

Highly rec­om­mend THE SINFUL LIFE OF LUCY BURNS if your look­ing for a really good story to sink your­self into. The nar­ra­tive voice drew me in almost imme­di­ately and I really liked Lucy despite her flaws. I won’t go into too much detail about the themes of the novel but as you can imag­ine it is about the bal­ance of good and evil, sac­ri­fice and redemp­tion. This was just a really good story all around. My grade, B+. Well done.

Addi­tional Note: This book is avail­able in ebook via Kin­dle for­mat and in hardcover.