Another week, another book review!
This one comes from a deeper place, a shelf in my past. My mom bought The Dark Power Collection by Bill Myers when I was in primary school, but I wasn’t a reader yet. They just waited. Patiently. It wasn’t until my teenage years that I finally picked them up and they didn’t just change my reading habits. They changed me.
Seeking them out again as an adult felt like a pilgrimage. A longing to return to a time when my faith burned hot, like a scorching sun. I wouldn’t be honest if I said these books didn’t shape my early walk with Christ. They carved into my understanding of faith, discernment, and spiritual awareness during my most formative years as a young believer.
This review focuses only on the first book: The Society. I’ll give The Deceived and The Spell their own space in the coming weeks, because each one deserves to breathe.
The Society centers on Becca, a teenage girl who moves from South America to North America after a profound family loss. I won’t say more, you need to feel that shift for yourself but this upheaval becomes the soil where everything takes root.
Becca’s faith isn’t a performance. It’s her spine. In a new school and a new culture, she faces the isolating cruelty of bullying, but also something far more subtle: a spiritual awakening she never asked for. She encounters a group of teens who seem harmless—confused, curious, experimenting. Beneath the surface, however, they’re unknowingly entangled in occult practices. Becca and her brother recognize the danger and try to warn them, even as they wrestle with fear and the exhausting cost of standing firm.
What Bill Myers does so well, what unsettled me even as a child is that he refuses to oversimplify spiritual warfare. He shows how it seeps in. How something can be dismissed as just a game, just music, just curiosity.
But it’s never just anything.
Though written in the 1990s, this message cuts even deeper now. Myers, a stalwart of Christian YA fiction, highlights discernment without preaching. The book opens with a memory verse, rooting the story in Scripture from the very first page. It tells you exactly what kind of territory you’re entering.
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm on the evil day, and having done everything, to stand.”
In a generation where spirituality is often blurred, mocked, or stripped of weight, The Society offers a stark reminder: what we engage with matters. The voices we let in matter. The spaces we occupy matter.
This isn’t about fear. It’s about wisdom.
What has stayed with me, then and now, are these truths:
- The people you surround yourself with can cradle your faith—or crush it.
- Peer pressure is a real force, especially when you’re young in Christ.
- Discernment isn’t unkindness; it’s protection.
It reminds me of something my high school teacher once said—a lesson I’ve never shaken. He compared life to a slippery guava tree: if you’re in the tree and five people are on the ground pulling at you, who’s more likely to move? Will you pull them up—or will they pull you down?
That’s the brutal, beautiful reality The Society captures. Becca wants to help, to pray, to stand with these teens. But she learns that staying rooted sometimes means stepping away, not from judgment, but from fierce, trembling care.
The Society is a small book with colossal weight. It returns you to the foundation—when faith is tender, thrilling, and terrifyingly vulnerable. It whispers that not every open door is meant to be walked through, and not every circle is meant to hold you.
I highly recommend it to younger readers, new believers, and anyone longing to revisit faith-based fiction with both nerve and heart.
Next week, we dive into Book 2: The Deceived.
Thank you for reading with your heart.
That’s all for this week!
Until next time,
Natu Shimike ~ Kalaba 🌸
Keep them coming sister girl 🙌
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