“Amazing is what we do in Iowa.”
Ben Hufstedler
I will freely admit that I picked up this book because it is set in Iowa and written by an author from Iowa. It was well worth picking up as a touching look at grief, war, love, and hope affect us and those around us.
The McKay family has endured a lot, and they face even more in this book. Janey, especially, is the heart of the book. I sympathize with her frustrations as everything she tries to do is complicated or ended. I liked how the small-town people were shown with selfless acts to help those in need or watch out for each other, even if you have to dance around a local feud that no one remembers the beginning of.
This book looks at various situations and shows how people are drawn to different ideologies or used for something other than they thought. It also shows how easily a goal can be hijacked and altered from the original purpose.
This book’s themes are inspirational, with a search for peace at heart. Whether on Baghdad’s streets, in the cornfields of Iowa, or tucked into a hidden parish in Chicago, we’re all human. While heavily steeped in Catholicism, it should be noted that this is not a Christian Fiction book. Religiously, it falls closer to universalism.
While I enjoyed the characters and the different look at groups than we usually see, some things continuously jolted me out of the story. Events that happened around the rosary often seemed to occur out of nowhere and were odd enough to make me lose focus on reading. There is also a relationship subplot that annoyed me with its roller-coaster antics.
When the rosary pushed me out of the story, the characters and their struggles pulled me back in. They make this story worth reading.
