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Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite
The Update is a Christian fantasy novella for children and preteens written by Ann Strawn. Em was quite used to ignoring friend requests on her FaceSpace app. She preferred to deal with people directly and hadn’t really gotten on board with the popularity of that app. Her Angel app was a different matter. When she had first gotten it, she was besieged with texts from guardian angels. That app seemed to have been updated and was, for now, blessedly silent. When her friend teased her about ignoring his friend request, Em finally gave in and took a look at her FaceSpace home page. She was puzzled to see a request from Papa, the name she called her grandfather. Papa didn’t do internet as a rule and wasn’t at all comfortable with the computer he had. Em thought about it for a while and wondered if maybe her Angel app was really working after all -- just differently. She told her mom about it, and the two of them decided to pay Papa a visit.
Ann Strawn’s Christian fantasy novella for children and preteens, The Update, is a well-written and entertaining story about a young girl and her most amazing Angel app, and the app one of her techie classmates creates to compete with it. Could the Celestial App’s ability to predict based upon probabilities and other factors work as well as the Angel app in the ways that really matter? Strawn’s plot is original and compelling, and her characters are finely drawn and credible. And while I would agree that the Angel app would be a most marvelous thing to have, I was also quite taken with the concept of the Celestial App as well. The Update is highly recommended.
