The plot was super irritating and quite popular nowadays ~ an adventurous tale about a super brilliant and equally attractive American white male who gets thrust into world politics. In this case, it's a Westernized fantasy about a Saudi princess named "Miriam" (which is totally an Arabic name) who flees the oppressive prospect of marriage in her country and experiences "true freedom", that is, not wearing an abaya (which Dekker equates with looking like Darth Vader) and having titillating encounters with the Greek sculpture (yes, the white boy is a Greek sculpture. SMH)In any case, there was very little spiritual development in which the most concrete Biblical "truth", if you will, is when the hot-headed protagonist after a flirting session enters a church building where he meets a pastor, who, like in many Christian fiction stories, seems to have all the answers. Towards the end there is an appeal to the Christian God, though, why Miriam would make such a drastic change after being raised a Muslim isn't really expanded on other than the idea that she's equating her religion with the supposed cultural duties she has observed being thrust upon women. The issues within the Arabian Gulf do need to be addressed, however, the sensationalization by the Western media that exploits the trope of defenseless and oppressed Middle-Eastern women does little to help improve the issues. Arab and Muslim women do not need liberation in the form of marriage to white men or Westernization. They simply need education and resources that they can utilize to improve the political and social environments that they live in.
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The cover has the Dome of the Rock. The Dome of the Rock is in Al-Aqsa, Palestine. That is a Palestinian monument. That has absolutely NO relation to Saudi Arabia at ALL. (for those of you who don't know much about the Mashriq, al-Aqsa is in Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia is MILES away.) Further driving my point about Orientalist narratives.

Reread (on audio) of my favorite book from high school. I will never not love this book.

I will admit I DNFed this and couldn't finish it, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt.

Has this man ever met a Muslim woman. I genuinely don't think he's had a conversation with one in which he listened to a single thing she had to say. The first 10% of this book (which is all I could get through) plays like a Christian conversion fantasy, where even the ostensibly "not yet Christian" characters are parroting arguments and thoughts that are steeped in Christian perspectives and bias.

Also that's just not how college academia works. I can't believe your character is as smart as you claim (three standard deviations smarter than Einstein? Really?) if you're incapable of googling how higher education works.

Maybe it gets better later in the book, but a "genius" and a Muslim woman written by a man who seems to have no concept of either didn't bode well enough for me to to suffer to find out.

Ted Dekker delivers a nice page turner in Blink of an Eye. I found myself consumed with the action, hoping for a resolution to so many themes. In the end, I was left with a lackluster ending that didn't do justice to the ambitious ideas he began with.

Other reviewers share my sentiments, namely that Blink took on too many disparate themes and doesn't conclude them powerfully. It reads like a thriller that throws in everything but the kitchen sink. Unlike Dekker's AD 30, which took on a Christian historical setting and held to it with commitment, Blink reads like a choppy creative writing experiment weaved together. The political correct among us may find Dekker's portrayal of an anti-female and unromantic Muslim society to be off-putting; for me, the idea of a runaway Arab bride whose marriage could change the political order in Saudi Arabia was good, and produced strong villains for the story. But Blink begins to unwind from its core when the setting roams off-field, heading into the U.S. State Department, journeys into Americana, and so on.

Seth begins as an arrogant, somewhat prissy intellectual who somehow acquires future-telling abilities (how we don't know), and winds up helping a fugitive woman. While Seth came across as a super-genius and a ladies man on campus, he spends the rest of the novel as a clumsy James Bond character, saving Miriam from capture while expressing himself as socially inept. It is laughable how Seth throws out lines to his captors like "In three out of four futures, you kill me..." or "I only see an escape in two future settings, and both involve leaving now...". The uninspiring romance between Seth and Miriam is typical of the genre. Like many fast-paced, zany thrillers, the two characters barely know each other but end up on a life-threatening and world-changing adventure, and learn that they could never live without each other ever again. Mind you, this is in a story that happens over only a few action-packed days, and most of their dialogue is spent on overcoming cultural and religious barriers; in other words, the attraction is nonsense.

I listened to this audiobook while driving from Salt Lake City Utah, to Las Vegas and then down through L.A.. It was a great time waster.

Here we have a Saudi-Arabia modern Princess who flees to America because she's forced to marry some political butthead who's trying to take over the thrown. Yawn! The fun part is: she meets up with a Berkeley student Genius who has a Supernatural gift to choose the future. The run from bad guys and FBI agents... hilarity ensues.

Ted Dekker is a Christian author who inserts very little Christianity into his fictional tales. Yet Christian bookstores are overflowing with his literal dribble. Oh well. There's worse things people could read. I generally enjoy them.

This is a fun and annoying love story. The Princess and the surfer dude. I can't picture them ending up happily ever after. They barely have anything in common other than lust and attraction, and quirky conversation. But that's better than some folks I know.

AS I was truckdriving through the L.A. area in California: the characters in the story were having a car chase through L.A.. AS if that wasn't fun --- the characters then turned onto the 210 freeway in the Pasadena area, AND I WAS ON THE 210 in Pasadena. How's that for making a book come to life. The characters were heading to Las Vegas to win some gambling money and fly to Paris. I just came from Las Vegas with no intention of winning or flying. But it was a fun moment.

The book had a creative angle: The main character SETH (student genius at Berkeley University) could see the future possibilities in front of him. He knew what possibilities were about to happen. He could then choose his next actions based on knowing what the police or badguys were likely to do. His gift strengthens throughout the book.
The characters philosophize over this slightly. By the end of the story his gift fades... God only loaned it to him for a short mission.

It was the humor that made this story amazing. Probably the funniest think Ted Dekker has ever written.
His insights and Islamic abuses will most likely have every Muslim raging against him as if he drew a cartoon character of Muhammad and put it in the Sunday Times. But Islam is what it is. Which led to some very interesting religious discussion amongst the Surfer and the Princess.

This would make a fun movie. But Hollywood would most likely seriously screw it up. Or worse: have Tom Cruise play the surfer dude.

This book was so strange that at first I thought it was a continuation of of "The Martyr's song" but when I read that Seth had the gift of seeing the future, I completely changed my mind. This book talks about the future, love, the Middle East conflict, faith, etc.. I loved the characters and enjoyed every page but the names seemed a little strange but in the end, the whole story was great.

This one is blatantly Christian and horrendously far fetched, with a protagonist with an IQ no one has ever achieved and the gift of precognition that comes and goes, a precognition that not only sees what will happen, but what could happen in all the multiple variants of reality that might result. And he needs that gift: to rescue a Saudi princess from her evil father, evil adopted father, and evil suitor who hopes by marrying the princess to make an alliance to overthrow the Saudi king and turn Saudi Arabia into an Islamist state, thereby threatening the peace of the world. Though the plot is far fetched, the characters are intriguing, the view of Islam and Saudi royalty is informative (semi factual?), though biased. The novel’s protagonist struggles with the age old dilemma: if God knows everything, then He knows the future (witness: prophets). If he knows what will happen, how can man have free will? Thus, for man to have free will, there must not be an omniscient God. As the protagonist sees varying views of the future and chooses between them, manipulating reality, he becomes an atheist: how can God be omniscient, since there is no one future for Him to know? The novel’s proposed solution is a bit far fetched, as is the scenario. The novel’s fast paced and fun to read, but includes some offensive brutality (include an Islamic punishment taken from Princess where a father is forced to drown his daughter in their family pool because she refuses the husband forced upon her by her family his “right” to sex. ) Probably not a book that would attract most students: ok for a fundamentalist or religious kid not offended by brutality and language who likes adventure stories that really stretch reason.

So this is Ted Dekker at his best in story telling, high paced, fast moving and interesting characters.
really loved and enjoyed this story. It never gets boring.
definatly one of my favaurite Dekker books. I love this infusions of precognition it kinda reminds me of Minority Report.
The archs that the charators Seth and Mirriam go through are quite interesting.

Meh. Pretty bland all around. Not enough compelling writing to persuade me to pick up another Dekker novel.

I actually read "Blink of an Eye" which is a revised edition of Blink. I had never read anything by Ted Dekker only watched a few of his movies. I am not one to read scary books as I get nightmares, but this one was fine in that area. I really enjoyed this book. I have recommended it to many people since reading it and they have all really liked it as well. It has a bit of romance, lots of adventure, and some suspense. I learned a great deal about the culture in Saudi Arabia that I had no idea was happening.

I applaud Ted Dekker for this eye opening novel of his. I truly enjoyed every moment of this book. It gave me a new perspective on life, my religion and faith in general. AT first I didn't like the fact that he could see the future, I saw it as a cheat. I wanted Seth to use his extreme intelligence to prevail against his enemies. I thought seeing the future was a bit cliché. But the fact that he could see possible futures and the future in which occurs depends on the actions he takes and the reaction of other , really did amaze me. It got me thinking, is there only one future or many possible futures and if there are many possible futures, the actions we take today have a big effect on what our futures will look like, God or no God. We all have our parts to play in the game called "LIFE" .

A don't-think-too-hard-about-it thriller. This was a page turner without emotional depth, but although it had some promise at the beginning for addressing problems like whether the future is fixed by its being known, it kind of dropped the ball on actually addressing them and turned into a man-hunt / escape attempt aided by clairvoyance and prayer.