Quaker Summer

I have just finished the amazing journey of reading Quaker Summer
by Lisa Samson. If you have read Lisa's novels before, you know they are populated with characters for whom both God and earthly life are very real, and sometimes raw. There is plenty of dirt under the fingernails, skinned knees and bruised egos. And a startling lack of pat answers.

Quaker Summer follows eight months in the life of Heather Curridge, as she travels from her lavish home by the loch to the privileged school her son attends, into the path of a kangaroo and a home of wise women, to a last chance hotel housing homeless drug addicts and a nun with a raw knuckled hope. God holds up a mirror to Heather through the many vivid characters who surround her, and pries from her her addiction to things, the false comforts she has swaddled herself in, but also her guilt and grief at her role as a childhood tormentor.

Heather's Suburban plows her forward on a path that is relentless and impossible to abandon. Many times I held the book in my lap to pause to laugh, to cry, to gasp in self-recognition, or just breathe the priceless and unexplainable grace, that against all odds, envelops us, beloved by God.

Lisa Samson employs her usual deft balance of character development and introspection with a bracing plot. She skillfully moves us backward and forward in time, all over the map of our carefully ordered sense of the different parts of the Body of Christ, and is as unflinching in her rendering of doubt, questions and cruelty as she is in her compassion and respect for her characters.

I am more than thankful I read this book, but I can't say yet all the ways it will change me. There's room. Join Heather and find yourself in the story.