Cbgrace’s Weblog

A few weeks ago, I was telling a friend about a fiction book I enjoyed reading.  The book is “Peace Like a River” by Leif Enger.  It is not all that new; published in 2001.  I couldn’t locate my copy (I must have lent it out) so I checked it out from the library.  Dennis has been reading it and enjoying it as much as I did. 

Here is a little blurb about the book…

“Peace like River is the story of a father raising his three children in the 1960s in Minnesota.  It is at once a heroic quest, a tregedy, a love story, and a haunting meditation on the possibility of miricles in the everyday world…

Eleven-year-old Reuben Land was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled.  Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy who knows firsthand what life is a ift, and also one who suspects his father is touched by God and can overturn the laws of nature.

The family ends up traveling across the Badlands in search of Reuben’s older brother Davy.  It is sprinkled with playful nods to biblical tales, beloved classics such as Huckleberry Finn,  the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the westerns of Zane Grey.  The story unfolds like a revelation.”

Not only is the story great, it is very well written.