Fiction Review: Ordinary Grace

Last spring, our All County Reads book was This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger, so my neighborhood book group got free copies from the library. We all loved it--a rarity for us to all agree on a book!--and it was my #2 book of the year for 2022. So, my book group chose another Krueger novel, Ordinary Grace, for our March book this year. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 2014. Like the previous novel, this one did not disappoint, with historical fiction wrapped around a moving coming-of-age story, with a hefty dose of nature and a mystery at its center.

Thirteen-year-old Frank lives in southern Minnesota in a small town with his parents, older sister, Ariel, and younger brother, Jake. Their father is the Methodist minister in their town and two other neighboring towns. Frank narrates this story as an adult, looking back on the summer of 1961, which changed him forever. As he explains early in the novel, four deaths occurred in town that summer. The first happens even before the novel opens: a boy named Bobby, about the same age as he and Jake, was killed by a train. It's widely assumed to be a terrible accident, but Frank overhears some adults saying it could have been something else. That kicks off a life-changing summer for Frank, filled with loss, confusion, and adult topics he'd been shielded from until now. Three more deaths occur soon after, with one of them clearly a murder. Frank narrates from the point of view of what it was like for his thirteen-year-old self and how all of that loss affected him and his brother during that memorable, hot summer.

While there is a murder mystery in this book with plenty of red herrings, it is primarily historical fiction with a poignant coming-of-age story at its center. As in This Tender Land, Krueger has an amazing talent for bringing to life a particular time and place. This novel is soaked in nostalgia, as Frank looks back on that eventful summer when he had to grow up too soon. Also similar is Krueger's beautiful rendering of the natural world. Here, the river that runs through town (with those train tracks that run alongside it) is a central point in the boys' childhood and in the deaths that occur that summer: a place of both play and pain. Krueger's lyrical writing combines with a gripping plot and in-depth characters to create a story that is engrossing and moving. This Tender Land is still my favorite Krueger novel (so far), but Ordinary Grace is a close runner-up.

336 pages, Atria

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This book fits in the following 2023 Reading Challenges:

 

Mount TBR Challenge

Monthly Motif Challenge - plants or flowers on the cover

Alphabet Soup Challenge - O

Literary Escapes Challenge - Minnesota

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