I must admit, I found this a little slow getting into; however, after about 30-50 pages, I was hooked. Heaven Lake really does touch on so many subjects. The travel in China was so interesting and so well depicted that I could easily see, hear, and smell the surroundings. The portrayal of the Chinese I found to be respectful yet not sugarcoated. The characters truly became people I felt I knew.

Vincent's transition from an overzealous Christian volunteer to one who fully learned to realize (if not understand) God's grace is not an easy one; he has no epiphanies; he just slowly grew into another person. In the middle of the book (page 304 -thanks to the Amazon search feature), the author so clearly and succintly summarizes Vincent's growth, his realization, that "you could navigate your life without knowing. Even more, you could occasionally be awed by the mystery. You could sometimes love the mystery as devoutly as the believers loved their gods."

The book is certainly not short on plot either. The twists and surprises easily keep the reader interested. Overall, this book is certainly worth a read. Anxious to read more from this author. ( )

The story of a young American missionary who arrives in a small city in Taiwan in 1990, falls into some unsavory liaisons, and is talked into a sham marriage with a woman in northwestern China, along the way, of course, losing his innocence but not his sense of wonder. The middle third of the novel is worth the price alone--a journey by train and bus across the mountains, plains and deserts of China. You could read it purely for the evocative, rich descriptions of landscapes and people, but it's also a spiritual Odyssey, written deftly and without judgement or pronouncements, through changing geography and perceptions. The rest of the novel is equally well-written, with excellent characterizations of Chinese and expatriates. Some of the characters are almost obligatory types--the overly-earnest female missionary, the cynical foreign backpacker-teacher--but each was rounded out well enough to make them believable. As other reviewers have said, by the end of the novel I wanted to give the main character, if not a hug, then a reassuring pat on the back.

I did catch a few sloppy errors in descriptions of Hong Kong--trams in Kowloon (there aren't any), bank closing times, taxi colors, and several others--which a little bit undermined the credibility of the travelogue aspect of the book.

Otherwise, a richly satisfying reading experience. ( )

Although the book has its moments, I was disappointed with its inaccuracies. It definitely captures the Asian culture in which it is set. The characters and world are quite vivid. It's obvious the author has experienced the culture and done his research. But the main character is represented as a fairly conservative missionary type, and his transformation from saint to sinner seems very cliché. It's perhaps the view a Liberal would take of a conservative Christian -- always questioning the sincerity and integrity of the person without really understanding who they are. But it does not accurately represent the real such people I know and have experienced my whole life. Thus,I had trouble buying it. I also thought the story's paced waned in the middle. The end left me empty because of the character issues above. Still, the prose is well written. ( )

A young, rather naive man comes to Taiwan as a missionary and English teacher, and is launched by a chain of events – beginning with his affair with one of his underage students – on both an internal spiritual journey and a literal journey across China to bring back a wife for his employer. This novel is always quiet, in both its moments of beauty and despair, of spiritual insight and despondency, and so culminates in a reading experience that is quietly but powerfully moving. ( )

In times like these, when so many people are slaves to their Blackberries, PCs, iphones and e-mail, few of them are apt to want to read a book that exceeds 200 pages. But every now and then a big fat novel comes along that is well worth the time it takes to read. Heaven Lake is one of those novels. I will admit that the very thickness of this book was a bit intimidating when I first picked it up, and then, in the first few pages, when I learned that its protagonist, Vincent Saunders, was a young Christian missionary fresh out of college, come to spread the Word to the people of Toulio, Taiwan, I was again a bit put off. Oh no, I thought - one of those dull, preachy, way too-Christian tomes that I learned long ago to steer clear of. But the book was a swap. I had traded one of my own books for it with its author, John Dalton, so I figured I should at least give it a chance, and I am so glad I did. Because Vincent quickly turns out to be a very human, very fallible young man, who soon begins to question his beliefs and proves to have feet of clay when it comes to all the normal temptations of being young, lonely and far from home in a foreign land.

Less than a dozen pages into the novel Vincent's moral opposite appears in the person of Scotsman Alec McGowan, a fellow roomer in the house he initially occupies. Alec is a devotee of hash-smoking and loose living, who has been tramping about the Far East and the Indian subcontinent for nearly a decade. And yet he possesses a kind of cosmopolitan well-traveled charm that Vincent tries hard to resist, until, that is, Vincent himself becomes embroiled in an affair with a teenage student in one of his English Language and Bible classes. True, the student, Trudy, is extremely forward and definitely the agressor in the ill-advised relationship, but after several weeks of never touching another human being, Vincent guiltily succumbs to Trudy's advances and the fleshly comforts of her warm young body. Of course he gets caught, receives a vicious beating from the girl's brother, and is flatly warned to "get outa Dodge," prompting him to accept the terms of a shady deal from a local businessman, Mr. Gwa, which sends him on a picaresque, adventure-filled journey across the breadth of mainland China to bring back a "bride" for Gwa from the far western industrial town of Urumchi, which is near the title's Heaven Lake, a real place, located high in the "mountains of God."

Vincent's faith is sorely tested from the very outset of this story, even before he gets himself into trouble. He is secretly ashamed, for example, for not interfering when his neighbors set upon a homeless, probably retarded man in the street in front of his house and beat him cruelly and then haul him away. Vincent is reminded daily of his inaction as he skirts the lingering bloodstains on the sidewalk. Disturbed by this episode, Vincent reflects upon it, trying to understand it -

"It did seem, truly, that there were voids into which the light of Christ or Buddha or any other hopeful belief could not travel. There were chasms in this world that deflected any earnest attempt at faith."

Later, as Vincent makes his way across the wide reaches of mainland China by train and bus, he encounters even worse examples of these "voids," and the journey takes on a kind of Dante-esque "to-Hell-and-back" quality of horror he could never have imagined in his previously comfortable faith-based upbringing. In the city of Lanzhou he witnesses a group of bus-drivers casually stoning a woman in a parking lot near the train station. Her crime? She had snuck into one of their buses to sleep at night. She was "... dirty. She makes a smell in the back of the bus. A very bad smell." Overcoming his fear of the drivers and his own aversion to the woman's filth and odor, Vincent rescues her and takes her to a clinic, where he makes a horrific discovery among her few meager possessions -

"... he squatted down beside the woman's rolled blanket. He unwound the first layer, then the next. Inside were two dead, naked infants - girls, twins, each with round bellies and thin, puckered arms. They both appeared undersized, perhaps premature. They had a stiff-limbed hold on each other, a life-seeking embrace. Their eyelids were barely parted. Their stilled gaze was the most horrendous thing he'd ever seen."

Sadly, this kind of awful revelation was barely the beginning of Vincent's education in the cruelties that men are capapble of. He learns more nearly every day about those "chasms" where the love of Christ - or Buddha - seem so painfully absent. Betrayal, greed, intrigue and indifference become commonplace experiences as his journey continues and his original mission to collect a bride for Gwa collapses and fails.

In an interesting side note, on the return trip to Hong Kong, Vincent meets a customs agent on a bus, who, much to the scorn of Alec (with whom Vincent has made part of the trip), comments, "Some say that in twenty years, in thirty years, China will be leader of the modern world." Considering the year was 1990, one feels a chilling current of prophecy in reading this.

The pacing, the plotting, and especially the characters of Heaven Lake are nearly letter-perfect throughout this beautiful novel, which made me eager to return to it each time I was interrupted by other responsibilities. As I drew near the final pages, I realized that, long as this book is, I didn't want the story to end. And perhaps the neatest hat trick Dalton performs here is the way he manages to end Vincent's story on a note of profound hope, which is no small feat, considering the dark revelations about human nature presented periodically throughout the narrative. While Heaven Lake may not be a book you can read in a few hours, it is most certainly one which you will remember for a long time. ( )