is a story that I'd recommend to anyone. 
is a story a Lafferty fan would like. 
are short stories, that are either really boring or just lesser variations of a recurrent theme.
Aurelia was a fifteen-year-old girl. From a very advanced world. She'd passed Starship building easily enough. But she'd slept through most of celestial navigation. That was how she ended up on a little back-water dump like Earth. Where her advanced powers seemed like miracles. Some thought she was the Messias. Some thought she was the Devil. No one was prepared for the truth.
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This little synopsis (found on the inside page of the book), nor the cover, does this novel justice. I just finished reading it and I thought it was wonderful. There is a sad beauty to it that really took me by surprise.
Stylistically, it feels like a mix of Space Chantey and Reefs of Earth - but still very distinct from those two as well. It has some of the best and most biting political and social satire I've seen from Lafferty. But it is full of grace and compassion too. It is very beautifully written with an interesting cast of characters, an easy-to-read pace and plot - one that has a certain pageantry as the story progresses - and is punctuated with some woolly wonders, some lovely and some grotesque.
Within all this are many moving 'homilies' that seem to overall be arguing for a Thomistic Virtue Ethics. The Mad Magazine sort of illustrations throughout are not so great in my opinion and are quite distracting from the great prose and story. This one deserves to be better known. I think it has some of the most poignant things Lafferty has to say to the world in it. Whereas many of his other novels are Apocalypses of one sort or another, this one is an Advent.