Lila
Fiction
Macmillan
October 7, 2014
272
Abandoning her homeless existence to become a minister's wife, Lila reflects on her hardscrabble life on the run with a canny young drifter and her efforts to reconcile her painful past with her husband's gentle Christian worldview.
Wonderful description, and held my interest all the way through. But while all the back story on Lila was really interesting, the narrative got a bit lost in the brambly hedges of the Mid-West countryside, along with the theology. The better the description of a hardscrabble life — which in this book is exquisite — the more any culmination of universalism has to come off like the ultimate ta-da! deus ex machina, special pleading, just-so ending. Everybody is rotten, and then we die, and everything is bliss. Imagine our surprise.