Ordinary Grace
By: William Kent Krueger / Narrated By: Rich Orlow
Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
Yes William Kent Krueger takes his sweet time, but oh the journey!
I s’pose I could ding Ordinary Grace for plodding a bit as taking close to about 10 hours before we get to the point/the lesson is quite a bit, is it not? After all, this won an Edgar Award, and that’s s’posed to mean it’s all fraught and cloak-and-dagger(ish), right?
But gosh, I’m soooo fond of stories that rather mirror Life, where ‘tain’t the end that’s so important; it’s the entire gosh-danged journey that counts. And lemme tell ya, author William Kent Krueger takes his own sweet time doing all sorts of things like capturing the essence of small-town 1961 life, like fleshing out every single character, by making even the “villains” well and truly finely-crafted human beings.
Like building, eeeeeever so slowly, the tension of death Death DEATH visiting the little town, visiting the community, visiting a young family. What starts as the tragic and enigmatic death of a little boy, riven to bits by a speeding train, morphs into the death of an “itinerant” (read: homeless/“hobo”), further escalates to suicide attempts, murder, senseless accidental deaths by the end. In sweet prose that is graceful and that juuuuust borders on the sentimental. Yup, some other reviewers found it too cloying, but I enjoyed it, feeling that it captured a simpler way of life.
Mostly this is the story of young Frank as he navigates through tragedy after tragedy, seeking answers and trying to figure out how to live after the worst happens. He’s a scrappy kid, no innocent and always pushing the envelope. Little brother Jake is the good and proper kid, but Frank is his only friend, and so he’s forever dogging Frank’s heels, even as the duo wind up in some unfortunate situations. As Frank hears things, usually through shameless eavesdropping, he starts stacking clues up, and I s’pose that’s where things went a triiiifle south for me, where things were just a wee bit off.
Cuz you see, I figured out Whodunnit pretty early on, and I wondered why the police didn’t. And we all know that I’m an Oblivious Git when it comes to Mysteries (But I’m getting sharper, yessss!), so I did indeed find it a bit distracting, cuz really! ya know?
So sussing things out early on, and the fact that Frank learns sooo much cuz he just HAPPENS to be in the wings for every single important conversation was a bit much. But the writing was graceful, and I did sooo like the way the characters were built upon, and I esPECially liked the way the title of the book, Ordinary Grace, was handled and built to.
Rich Orlow does a jolly decent job handling the youthful exuberance of Frank to go with the sometimes-stutter of young Jake. He didn’t turn Jake into a stuttering caricature but instead portrayed the boy’s frustration and distress as he tried to sound out his thoughts. Further, Orlow didn’t try too hard with the women in the story, making them sound off or silly. I caught the angst of mom, her complete and utter anger, her devastating and crippling grief, and all this was done right alongside dad’s own grief, his own acceptance of the Will of a Loving God, He whose purposes are Unknowable. Add to this, that the writing took its own sweet time to get to the point, and p’raps it could’ve come off as a snooze fest but wasn’t? Oh huzzah huzzah huzzah!
I hear-tell that Krueger writes a mystery series, and while I did indeed like the way this one rolled out, I must admit that I hope those others roll out a wee bit faster. I wouldn’t call this one a Thriller, but there was some Suspense… just not much.
Grand as a kinda sorta Coming of Age novel, a decent enough Whodunnit (As in: It was entirely reasonable for our “villain” to make that particular choice).
And darned-tootin’! You better belieeeeeve that I’m tickled pink with having figured out things by the end. Not too preachy, just enough mystery, and a couple o’ grand Lessons by the end. That’s a Good Enough Story for me!
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