I read Ordinary Grace in 5 days. I think I mentioned multiple times to my family members that it was the perfect summer read. Although that would imply that it would take a full summer to read. Which for me, it certainly did not. I guess it helps that I'm off work for over a week and am in northern Michigan with not much to do other than hang out and read a book (and drink. So there's that too).
The story is told by Frank, a 13-year-old in a small town in Minnesota during the summer of 1961. Frank has a younger brother Jake who has a severe stutter, an older sister Ariel who is a piano virtuoso, a father who is the town minister, and a mother who is not happy with being dealt the hand of the preacher's wife (which her husband wasn't going to be when she married him). The book starts by telling of the death of another small child who was killed on the railroad tracks by a train. The rest of the summer is plagued by death in multiple different circumstances. In spite of this sounding like kind of a dark story (and in some regards, it is), it's actually very nostalgic, back to times when kids went out and played in every nook of their neighborhood, stopped by their friends' houses to see if they could come out and play, listened to baseball games on the radio, and played out in the woods and down by the river. The entire time I was reading it, I kept thinking about how much I would love to see this book made into a movie. And while it inevitably will draw comparisons to Stand by Me, this book was centered more around family dynamics versus Stand by Me which focuses more around a circle of friends.
I have to admit that I did guess the ending; there were a few specifically placed foreshadows that drew the reader's attention to specific characters and relationships that I actually caught. But I really loved the book. The only minor quibble with the story though, is that the main character always seemed to be in the right place at the right time to see or hear things that he wasn't supposed to, which put him in a unique position to understand more about the ongoing situations than anyone else. And after a while, it just seemed a little too coincidental that every single chapter he put himself in just the right position to eavesdrop or spy on people.
So if you're looking for a charming, nostalgic book with interesting characters and a very interesting storyline, you'll enjoy it for a summer read!
Next up, I switch back to a booklist book in Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston. I don't know a single thing about this book other than what the description is on the back, and based on that, it certainly sounds very interesting. Although it sounds like there could be a possibility of it being really out there enough to frustrate me. So we shall see!
Happy 4th of July weekend!
