What do you think?
Rate this book
Walk Back the Cat
From AD 33, to the 1950s, to 2005, Walk Back the Cat tells the intricate, page-turning story of Wesley Bright. A corrupt, mediasavvy clergyman, he's out to destroy the Christian church of the God who was never there during his childhood.Like a cat retracing its steps to return home, the reader must go back to discover the root causes of Wesley's actions.Connecting the vast time shifts are mysterious characters and elements surrounding the Shroud of Turin, the burial cloth of Jesus. And although Wesley thrives on proving that truth is relative, what will soon transpire is brilliantly absolute.
- GenresChristian Fiction
310 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2006
1 person is currently reading
59 people want to read
About the author
Pamela Binnings Ewen
12 books238 followersAfter practicing law for many in Houston, Texas, Pamela Binnings Ewen turned to writing. She lives in Mandeville, Louisiana near New Orleans. She is the author of The Moon in the Mango Tree, and five other books. Based on a true story, The Moon in the Mango tree was awarded the 2012 Eudora Welty Memorial Award by the National League of American Pen Women.
Pamela's newest novel, The Queen of Paris, will be released April 7, 2020 by Blackstone Publications. This electrifying story, based on the real life of Coco Chanel during WWII as the Nazi's occupied Paris, reveals the underside of the celebrated icon, as has never before been fully told. The Queen of Paris is available for Pre-order now.
Pamela's other novels are Dancing on Glass (a Single Titles Reviewer's Choice award), Chasing the Wind (a Top Pick for RT Reviewers), An Accidental Life, and Secret of the Shroud. She also wrote the non-fiction best-seller Faith on Trial, now in second edition.
Pamela has served on the board of directors of Inprint (Houston, Texas), The Tennessee Williams Festival (New Orleans, Louisiana) and on the advisory board of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society (New Orleans). She is President of the Northshore Literary Society located in St. Tammany Paris, Louisiana. In 2009 Pamela received the President’s Arts Award from the Cultural Commission of St. Tammany Parish as Literary Artist of the Year.
Pamela's newest novel, The Queen of Paris, will be released April 7, 2020 by Blackstone Publications. This electrifying story, based on the real life of Coco Chanel during WWII as the Nazi's occupied Paris, reveals the underside of the celebrated icon, as has never before been fully told. The Queen of Paris is available for Pre-order now.
Pamela's other novels are Dancing on Glass (a Single Titles Reviewer's Choice award), Chasing the Wind (a Top Pick for RT Reviewers), An Accidental Life, and Secret of the Shroud. She also wrote the non-fiction best-seller Faith on Trial, now in second edition.
Pamela has served on the board of directors of Inprint (Houston, Texas), The Tennessee Williams Festival (New Orleans, Louisiana) and on the advisory board of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society (New Orleans). She is President of the Northshore Literary Society located in St. Tammany Paris, Louisiana. In 2009 Pamela received the President’s Arts Award from the Cultural Commission of St. Tammany Parish as Literary Artist of the Year.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 21, 2019
I don't even know how to review this book! I didn't really like the main character at all. But some of the others were really neat. Anyway, it's about faith, and it's pretty darn amazing.
August 17, 2024
Started out with a jaw dropping first page and it continued from there.
May 20, 2009
I got this book via PaperbackSwap, and couldn't remember what it was about or who recommended it to me, which is really the best way to go into a book (or a movie, for that matter). No preconceptions.
After a couple of chapters I could see a polemic being set up between faith and the secular world, but it took me a while to figure out exactly which side the book was on because it just didn't have the feel of a typical Christian novel, at least not at first.
Actually, it was sort of strangely timely, because a lot of the tension in the book is surrounding whether or not faith in the supernatural makes sense (all woven into a good story), and I've been dealing with those questions a lot recently. It has a bit of the feel of "The DaVinci Code" without the crazy action, and in the end siding with faith instead of against it. All in all, it's a pretty good novel that I do recommend. It is reviewed well outside of the Christian community as well.
Now, stop reading here if you don't want spoilers or to engage in a discussion of theology.
Once I realized that this book was coming down on the side of faith, I was sort of puzzled by a few elements in it. First of all, one of the debates my friends and I got into in college was about apologetic methods - in other words, how people come to belief and how we guide them there. The two general sides are presuppositionalism and evidentialism. To put it briefly, evidentialism says that we argue from evidence and proof of facts lead to faith (i.e. "The Case for Christ" and "Evidence that Demands a Verdict") On the other side (where Isaac and I generally find ourselves), we say that though facts and reason for our beliefs to exist, rarely does anyone come to faith becomes of rational arguments. In the end we choose a presupposition - perhaps take a "leap of faith", regardless of what we believe. For Isaac in particular this follows his reformed theology, because he believes that no one believes until God first changes their heart.
In any case, Ewen comes down hard on the evidentialism side - she very clearly says that without proof, people lose faith. So - the novel goes on to attempt to show some proof for faith, and this is where I was really puzzled, because her proof is one I've never heard before, and so I actually thought that the novel would end up being against faith because I thought her proof was somewhat laughable. She centers the story around the Shroud of Turin, which I really knew nothing about, but it is an old relic that is said to be the burial cloth of Jesus. Ewen basically centers the book around the validity and proof of the cloth being the ACTUAL shroud of Jesus, and this then gives us confidence in the truth of our faith.
Wow... so that really surprised me. The author's note in the back says that all of the research on the shroud presented in the book is real research, which was really shocking. I've got to go do my own research now. The thing is, I really agree with what Ewen says in the book through the character of Priest Leo: the death and resurrection of Christ is the center and foundation of our faith, and without it, Christianity falls. But what I really question is 1) whether the Shroud of Turin is really viable and 2) that we actually need something like the Shroud of Turin to have the historicity of the death and resurrection of Christ be viable. I think we have... MUCH better arguments, so much so that I really see no need to see the Shroud as important. Ewen is a lawyer, so that she really thinks the Shroud is viable... I don't know. It's surprising.
Oh yeah, and the other thing that got me is that while most of the book was meant to be very realistic and a realistic story that could happen today, there's one story line from back in the time of Jesus that follows the Apostle Peter's niece during the death and resurrection of Christ. It got really weird and had the little girl fade through time and appear to a modern day character... and it is her appearance to him that ultimately is meant to prove the truth of the Shroud to him. What? It just felt so... weird. It was like, if you're going to try to PROVE the Shroud by hard evidence, it's sort of contradictory to then bring in a sort of supernatural vision to seal the deal - wouldn't these characters simply not believe in the supernatural? It felt awkward to me.
In any case, it was a very different type of Christian novel than I am used to. I think the author may be Catholic and that may explain why we think so differently about faith.
After a couple of chapters I could see a polemic being set up between faith and the secular world, but it took me a while to figure out exactly which side the book was on because it just didn't have the feel of a typical Christian novel, at least not at first.
Actually, it was sort of strangely timely, because a lot of the tension in the book is surrounding whether or not faith in the supernatural makes sense (all woven into a good story), and I've been dealing with those questions a lot recently. It has a bit of the feel of "The DaVinci Code" without the crazy action, and in the end siding with faith instead of against it. All in all, it's a pretty good novel that I do recommend. It is reviewed well outside of the Christian community as well.
Now, stop reading here if you don't want spoilers or to engage in a discussion of theology.
Once I realized that this book was coming down on the side of faith, I was sort of puzzled by a few elements in it. First of all, one of the debates my friends and I got into in college was about apologetic methods - in other words, how people come to belief and how we guide them there. The two general sides are presuppositionalism and evidentialism. To put it briefly, evidentialism says that we argue from evidence and proof of facts lead to faith (i.e. "The Case for Christ" and "Evidence that Demands a Verdict") On the other side (where Isaac and I generally find ourselves), we say that though facts and reason for our beliefs to exist, rarely does anyone come to faith becomes of rational arguments. In the end we choose a presupposition - perhaps take a "leap of faith", regardless of what we believe. For Isaac in particular this follows his reformed theology, because he believes that no one believes until God first changes their heart.
In any case, Ewen comes down hard on the evidentialism side - she very clearly says that without proof, people lose faith. So - the novel goes on to attempt to show some proof for faith, and this is where I was really puzzled, because her proof is one I've never heard before, and so I actually thought that the novel would end up being against faith because I thought her proof was somewhat laughable. She centers the story around the Shroud of Turin, which I really knew nothing about, but it is an old relic that is said to be the burial cloth of Jesus. Ewen basically centers the book around the validity and proof of the cloth being the ACTUAL shroud of Jesus, and this then gives us confidence in the truth of our faith.
Wow... so that really surprised me. The author's note in the back says that all of the research on the shroud presented in the book is real research, which was really shocking. I've got to go do my own research now. The thing is, I really agree with what Ewen says in the book through the character of Priest Leo: the death and resurrection of Christ is the center and foundation of our faith, and without it, Christianity falls. But what I really question is 1) whether the Shroud of Turin is really viable and 2) that we actually need something like the Shroud of Turin to have the historicity of the death and resurrection of Christ be viable. I think we have... MUCH better arguments, so much so that I really see no need to see the Shroud as important. Ewen is a lawyer, so that she really thinks the Shroud is viable... I don't know. It's surprising.
Oh yeah, and the other thing that got me is that while most of the book was meant to be very realistic and a realistic story that could happen today, there's one story line from back in the time of Jesus that follows the Apostle Peter's niece during the death and resurrection of Christ. It got really weird and had the little girl fade through time and appear to a modern day character... and it is her appearance to him that ultimately is meant to prove the truth of the Shroud to him. What? It just felt so... weird. It was like, if you're going to try to PROVE the Shroud by hard evidence, it's sort of contradictory to then bring in a sort of supernatural vision to seal the deal - wouldn't these characters simply not believe in the supernatural? It felt awkward to me.
In any case, it was a very different type of Christian novel than I am used to. I think the author may be Catholic and that may explain why we think so differently about faith.
July 22, 2014
Because I can't go a month without casting my hope for good Christian speculative fic like bread onto the waves and watching it get water-logged and sink down into the ocean, never to return. Or something.
Preachy. Oversimplified. Pages of details about the Shroud of Turin, enough to turn this story into a pamphlet about why the Shroud of Turin is legit. Unpleasant in the extreme. Very like God's Not Dead in several ways - the blatant caricaturization of the antagonist, the two-bit attempts at making the other protagonists seem spiritual and inspiring, the paper-thin supporting characters, the overblown spiritual agonies, and finally, the gimmick that lies at the heart of the effort of writing the book: selling faith. [Blank] supports God - congratulations, atheists, you don't have a leg to stand on. God's not dead, and Jesus sent a little girl forward in time to give a modern-day heretic some flowers that will later initiate his almost-conversion.
Fantastic.
A couple points because 1) Wesley Bright's mother was borderline realistic and actually quite likable, and 2) the book made some token effort at acknowledging Leo's shallow, trite attempts at giving a grieving boy 'answers.' Not enough, because he fell back on shallowness and triteness in the end, too, but it was an effort, at least.
Preachy. Oversimplified. Pages of details about the Shroud of Turin, enough to turn this story into a pamphlet about why the Shroud of Turin is legit. Unpleasant in the extreme. Very like God's Not Dead in several ways - the blatant caricaturization of the antagonist, the two-bit attempts at making the other protagonists seem spiritual and inspiring, the paper-thin supporting characters, the overblown spiritual agonies, and finally, the gimmick that lies at the heart of the effort of writing the book: selling faith. [Blank] supports God - congratulations, atheists, you don't have a leg to stand on. God's not dead, and Jesus sent a little girl forward in time to give a modern-day heretic some flowers that will later initiate his almost-conversion.
Fantastic.
A couple points because 1) Wesley Bright's mother was borderline realistic and actually quite likable, and 2) the book made some token effort at acknowledging Leo's shallow, trite attempts at giving a grieving boy 'answers.' Not enough, because he fell back on shallowness and triteness in the end, too, but it was an effort, at least.
September 12, 2008
I liked the plot device she used. I talked to her in the bookstore and she told me her inspiration for this device was the movie "Pulp Fiction." An intriguing book
Read
September 8, 2009As good as the title...
May 31, 2011
Picked this up at the used book store. Was hoping for the next "DaVinci Code". More like "Left Behind."
August 20, 2012
Enh. Timeline inconsistencies drive me nuts. Ending was not satisfying.
July 17, 2013
I really enjoyed the research the author did on the Shroud of Turin and how it was included in the book. The character of the priest seemed realistic too.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews