On her recent visit, my sister Ruth recommended a compelling book she was reading on the plane. Then she went further and sent it to me when she got home! I had read and reviewed a copy of William Kent Kreuger’s more recent book, This Tender Land, which was recommended by my daughter, so I expected a good read.
The prologue of Ordinary Grace sets the stage in 1961 for a summer of deaths by accident, nature, suicide, and murder, beginning with a boy with golden hair and thick glasses who is killed on the railroad tracks. The protagonist Frank and his side-kick younger brother Jake live life as the Methodist preacher’s sons. Frank keeps his ears to doors and his nose into happenings around the small town with his stuttering younger brother anxiously following wherever he goes. Of particular interest to Frank, his older sister Ariel often slips out after everyone has gone to bed only to return in the early morning. His father’s dedication to the church, colored by some unknown happening in the war, becomes a disappointment to his mother who thought she had married an up and coming lawyer. Her ambivalence about her role as the minister’s wife shows in her dedication to the church’s music while refusing to give up the smoking and drinking frowned on by the parishioners. Then people start dying.
I related often to the accuracy of the preacher’s family including, “On a minister’s salary we ate cautiously but we ate well. That didn’t mean the food was good; my mother was a notoriously bad cook. But she was a savvy shopper and made sure there was plenty to sustain us.” He also includes the times when the minister himself is human and torn, “I confess I have cried out to God, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ Here my father paused and I thought he could not continue.”
In spite of the four deaths, the book does not seem dark. I think that may be because of the colorful and real characters who populate it and the small-town secrets that somehow everybody knows. Revelation of the line that reveals the title for the book is worth the read all by itself, but I will not spoil it. This book like Kreuger’s other book kills any chance of getting work done, but either is perfect for filling days when one is confined to the sunshine in a rocking chair on the front porch.