Peace Like A River

Black Swan, 2002. Very Good. When Israel Finch and Tommy Basca, the town bullies, break into the home of school caretaker Jeremiah Land, wielding a baseball bat and looking for tr ouble, they find more of it than even they expected. For seventeen-year-old Davey is sitting up in bed waiting for them with a Winchester rifle. His y ounger brother Reuben has seen their father perform miracles, but Jeremiah now seems as powerless to prevent Davey from being arrested for manslaughte r, as he has always been to ease Reuben's daily spungy struggle to breathe. Nor does brave and brilliant nine-year-old Swede, obsessed as she is with the legends of the wild west, have the strength to spring Davey from jail. Yet Davey does manage to break out. He steals a horse, and disappears. His family feels his absence so sorely, the three of them just pile into their old Plymouth, towing a brand new 1963 Airstream trailer, and set out on a q uest to find him. And they follow the outlaw west, right into the cold, wil d and empty Dakota Badlands. Set in the 1960s on the edge of the Great Plai ns, PEACE LIKE A RIVER is that rare thing, a contemporary novel with an epi c dimension. Told in the touching voice of an asthmatic eleven-year-old boy , it revels in the legends of the West, resonates with a soul-expanding sen se of place, and vibrates with the possibility of magic in the everyday wor ld. Above all, it shows how family, love, and faith can stand up to the mos t terrifying of enemies, the most tragic of fates.