Review: Things Get Even Dumber in Millie Maven and the Golden Vial (Spoilers).

As the title suggests, if you thought Millie Maven and the Bronze Medallion was a terrible story filled with New Age stupidity, just wait until you read Millie Maven and the Golden Vial, the book that involves children eating worm sludge (a-la Disney’s bastardization of Willow), the power of friendship, and finally gives the dumbest explanation for why Millie is the Chosen One. If you think that that sounds awful, congratulations. Welcome to the club.

The book opens exactly where we left off in The Bronze Medallion with Millie and her new friends, Mac and Boomer, arriving at FIGS, having finally received their medallions that they got from the power of navel-gazing and believing they’re special and it’s here that one of my questions from the first book is answered. That question was: Is FIGS supposed to be heaven? The answer to that is a tentative no in context to the lore of the book, and a yes in the context of the actual Bible. I say that because we find out that FIGS is supposed to be like a new Eden (though maybe not the actual Garden of Eden as shown from other bits of dialogue throughout the book). It’s supposed to be where these kids are taken after they’ve found their gifts so they can hone them and learn how to use them back in the normal world. However, while that might not sound too bad, keep in mind that Eden was destroyed after Adam and Eve sinned against God. Moreover, the idea of a new Eden is often used to describe heaven, the place that people can only reach if they repent of their sins and follow Christ, something that we see no one doing (except Millie, but she never did the first thing). Most of the kids are just horrible, bully Millie and her friends, and eventually Millie falls in line with them before getting another mushy pep-talk from the Great Teacher, a.k.a, Ted Dekker’s hippie-dippy-lovey-dovey version of Jesus.

That leads me to the trial itself. The trial is that Millie and the other students are basically yeeted into a bunch of tunnels and are supposed to stick together to find their way out and go to the top of a mountain to get the golden vial. Why are they doing this? What’s this supposed to teach them? I’m not entirely sure. My best guess is unity is good and division is bad or something. Either that or Ted Dekker needed a plot, but forgot to make it make sense.

During the trial of the golden vial, Millie starts having a bunch of weird dreams and hallucinations that her Aunt Pricilla (Remember her from the first book? Yeah. Neither did I.) is looking for her and is trying to drag her back home. It turns out that this is all Soren/Satan’s doing (though it’s also happening in real life), but before that, Millie and Co. run into a bunch of worm sludge in the tunnels and the kids become a bunch of sludge junkies, including Millie. This leads her to follow Soren’s prompting, and she finds another one of those magical puddle things that takes her back to her home, where she’s locked up in basement by Pricilla. However, because Millie is the special Chosen One, she has a dream and gets not only a bunch of self-affirmations from the Great Teacher, but we also are given the reason why people are mean and why Millie is special.

Are you ready for the reason? Sit down and take a deep breath. It’s going to shock you.

The reason why Millie, one of the most generic, Mary Sue characters I’ve ever read, is the Chosen One is because she isn’t just made perfect and whole but is also because her heart is totally free of judgement and the reason why people are mean to her is just because they’re afraid and don’t understand that they too are perfect and whole and loved by the Great Teacher.

That’s right.

That’s the reason.

Let that sink in for a minute. Maybe take a walk while you’re at it so you can absorb it all. Another option is to do what I did and scream your frustration and confusion into a pillow. That works too.

I touched on the ridiculousness of the idea that we’re created perfect and whole in my last Millie Maven review but let me reiterate why it’s stupid. While I don’t believe that everyone is completely evil, we are born with a sin nature thanks to Adam. Because of that, as much as we would like to believe that we’re a bunch of perfect, divine little snowflakes, we’re not. You could do all the good works in the world, and it still would not justify you before God, the perfect standard of morality. That’s why we need Jesus. That’s why he came and died for us, so that we can repent of our sins before him and be forgiven. That’s much different than the idea that it’s our shame that separates us from God and is much more profound and less narcissistic.

Additionally, the idea that a perfect Christian is free from judgement is laughable and is a complete misinterpretation of Mathew 7:1. Many people fail to read that verse in context and believe that Jesus is commanding his followers not to judge period. However, if you read all the way to verse 5, you would realize that he’s actually condemning judging hypocritically. Here’s what Matthew 7:1-5 actually says:

1“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. ² For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

³ “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? ⁴ How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Moreover, the Bible even encourages us to judge things with discernment based on what it says. This means that Millie is absolutely allowed to judge things and condemn certain behaviors, such as the character Doris being a jerk to everybody. However, the reason why this isn’t so because 1). Dekker seems to be operating off the premise that he can create his own, judgement-free version of Christ and 2). That doesn’t sell as well, even when it flies in the face of previous conflicts where Millie was judging others.

Anyway, if we go back to the rest of the book, Millie escapes from her Aunt Pricilla’s house thanks to some help from the maid, goes back to the trial, grabs the golden vial, saves the day, goes back to FIGS and gets a new symbol on her Mary Sue medallion and a cool cloak from the Great Teacher.

And that’s still not the end. We still have one more book to go.

Until next time,

M.J.