Book Review: Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

Ordinary Grace. William Kent Krueger. Atria Books (2013). 307 pages. Genre: Fiction, Mystery. 

First Line of the Prologue: "All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota, sliced to pieces by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota."

Summary:  The summer of 1961 Frank Drum is thirteen years old.  It should be a summer like most other summers, hot, dry and full of time.  Instead, it is a summer of tragedy.  Five deaths will occur in the small town of New Bremen, Minnesota before the summer comes to an end.  

My thoughts:  I must admit that the first line of the prologue almost caused me to reconsider reading the book.  I can be a sensitive reader when it comes to sadness and violence.  I had heard so many good things about William Kent Krueger that I persisted.  I am not sorry that I did.  

It was immediately evident that the book would be atmospheric.  From the first pages the reader gets a sense of the mood of the book.  The story takes place over the summer during a time when air conditioning in the Midwest was very rare.  It is hot and you get a sense that people are feeling unsettled.  A young boy has died rather violently and it is hard to understand why he wouldn't have moved when the train was coming. 

The story is told by Frank Drum as he remembers it forty years after it occurred.  He is a believable narrator and I liked the way he would occasionally insert his thoughts about a situation from his perspective as an older man.  Mostly though, his thoughts and perceptions seemed very much like a thirteen-year-old boy's would. Frank's family includes his father, who is a minister, his mother and his younger brother.  I really liked the way his relationship with his brother grows over the course of the summer. 

This is definitely a coming-of-age novel as Frank and his brother both experience situations that most parents would hope their children wouldn't experience until they are much older, if at all.  The book explores tragedy, grief, anger, prejudice, family and expectations while maintaining a thread of hope. It shows the messiness of life, but it also shows the grace of God. 

There is a part of me that wants to say I didn't like the book.  It is a story of grief and that is not always easy to read.  But it is beautifully written and ultimately it is a beautiful story.  If this sounds interesting to you I would definitely encourage you to read it.  

Content note:  There is some language that is appropriate for the situation and is not excessive. 

Quotes: 

"Bobby had a gift and the gift was his simplicity.  The world for Bobby Cole was a place he accepted without needing to understand it.  Me, I was growing up scrambling for meaning and I was full of confusion and fear."

"All three men stared at us and in their faces I could see my own fear reflected and magnified. Magnified to a degree I had not anticipated. Magnified perhaps by all the sick possibility that grown men knew and I did not.  Magnified probably by the alcohol they'd consumed.  Magnified certainly by the responsibility they felt as men to protect the children of their community."

"My father was well liked in the rural churches.  The sermons he preached, which were marked less by evangelical fervor than by a calm exhortation of God's unbounded grace, were well received by congregations composed primarily of sensible farm families who in most aspects of their public lives were as emotionally demonstrative as a mound of hay."