In Reversing Thrust, author Carl Hershey strives to convey a personal journey of discovery, coming to grips with family relationships.

He writes on page 146 about his goal: "I was to write a book in pursuit of publication on a grand scale. I was to put the words on paper, sharing honestly of my own personal experiences in life. I was to tell of my heart-wrenching week of spiritual realization, of the connections that I found between God and my father."

Reversing Thrust is simply too personal, not allowing the reader inside the process. Hershey asserts that he has gained insights about his family without providing details of those family relationships.

The structure of the book is creative but fails to do what it sets out to accomplish. Hershey structures the book as a metaphorical plane ride, a metaphorical journey across the ocean on a luxury Concorde jet. He alternates between chapters on the different stages of the flight (preparation, takeoff, flight, landing) and his personal journey in coming to terms with his family dynamic and especially his relationship with his father.

This structure suffers from several problems. The first, as previously mentioned, was that the chapters about his family are never told in sufficient detail. When he says his father is closed off, for example, he doesn't show how. When he says he never felt that his father loved him, it seems like a great revelation, and it probably was, personally. But he doesn't make the reader feel it. He doesn't help the reader understand why he felt that way.

For the same reason, the airplane flight seems like a forced construction. It doesn't naturally fit in with the story. And it also doesn't make it clear to the reader why this particular airplane flight is such an important one to him. It's likely he actually did take such a flight and it was an amazing experience for him, but the reader doesn't get a sense of what's at stake here.

One of the disappointments is that, based on book jacket information, Hershey is from a Mennonite background. The reader would expect that he would have explored whether that had anything to do with his being closed off, nor why he is living a different way today and whether that's significant. He explores none of those topics.

Reversing Thrust reads like a personal journey, and no doubt Hershey found it therapeutic to write about his emotions. But if he wants other people to draw from it to unravel their own family relationships, he needs to use more specifics and not rely so much on metaphor.

Xulon Press, 2004; ISBN: 1-594673-41-1