Category: Reviews by Deb Krueger

This has been one of my favorite reads of the year. It’s entertaining, relevant, and easy to read with laugh out loud pithy statements on today’s hot topics. Yet it shows real world consequences with the events happening in our society today. 

Lula Dean and Beverly Underwood have been rivals in Lula Dean’s mind since the high school cheerleading squad separated the girls. Living in Troy, Alabama, the women are now wives and mothers, with Beverly being the School Board President and Lula Dean living in her pink house with unrequited dreams of being a force in the community. 

Pornography was found in the baking section of the local library. It didn’t matter that the book on erotic cake decorating had been slipped into the shelves by a 13 year old prankster, but with this Lula Dean has found her calling! The children of Troy are in peril! Getting together with a group of like minded citizens, Lula and her cohorts get right to work listing books that “no right minded Christian would allow the precious children of this god fearing community to read.” Finding the same list online was proof that they had picked the right ones. 

The Concerned Parents Committee ransacked the high school, middle school, elementary and local libraries of these books. When the pictures of the confiscated books were shown on Facebook the question arose: What shall we do with these books? The answer came loud and clear–Burn them! 

An emergency community meeting the next night saw Beverly deciding that the school board would look into the matter of the books. Until a decision of how to handle the situation was reached, the books were to be stored in Beverly’s basement. 

The next morning an article about the books appears in the local paper with a picture of Lula standing next to a cabinet housing her library on her front lawn. Lula Dean’s Little Lending Library of wholesome books. 

Beverly’s daughter, Lindsay, who is gay and just heading off to her first year of college, is terribly unhappy with the situation, feeling that her mother should have handled the whole thing better. 

In the dark of night, the books in Lula’s library are switched from “wholesome” to banned with the bookcovers hiding the real titles. These books of literary classics, Black history, gay romance, Judy Blume novels and books of “witchy spells” replace Lula’s books of “The Southern Bell’s Guide to Ediquett”, “101 Cakes to Bake for your Family”, and “The Art of the Deal”. 

This sets off unexpected and unsettling events with the inhabitants of the town as they access the lending library. Lindsay, by changing the books, has kicked over a rock that had been long undisturbed-–exposing unsavory creatures living below to crawl out from under. “Nazis, rapists, and murderers, not to mention hypocritics and opportunists”– crawl out and are exposed to the community. 

A suicide of one the town’s most challenging inhabitants unearths a manifesto detailing a would be massacre on the of the people of Troy. A local Confederate general’s statue in front of the City Hall comes tumbling down as the descendants rebel against the false told tale of his honor and glory. 

All comes to a satisfying ending for Lula Dean. 

Our book club, as we like to do, discussed the cover enjoying the color, the little library of books with the lit match giving us thoughts of the novel “Fahrenheit 451.” We were very satisfied and delighted when the book cover was removed. Discover for yourself this intriguing and relevant book. It does not disappoint. 

— Deb Krueger

William Kent Krueger’s novel Ordinary Grace won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, the Anthony Award, and The Barry Award for 2013. Krueger has also written a series of mystery stories set in Minnesota based on sheriff/detective Cork O’Connor. 

Ordinary Grace is a coming of age-story set in 1961 New Bremen, Minnesota. The story is narrated by Frank Drum as an adult forty years later. He recounts the events and challenges of that summer when everything he, as a thirteen year old, thought he knew of the world he was living in, was falling apart. We feel, see, hear and think as the thirteen year old in this story. It feels as if the town and characters were very real in their human experiences and emotions. The tone of this story is written with a quiet melancholy air. 

Based in the small town of New Bremen, Minnesota, 13 year-old Frank, his brother Jake, and sister Ariel live with their parents Nathan, a Methodist minister and his wife Ruth. The story begins with the death of Bobby Cole, a child with golden hair and thick glasses killed on the railroad tracks. In that summer, the town saw five deaths, one of them was a member of the Drum family. Frank’s innocent summer transforms into a dark journey into adulthood. 

The family members and the community deal with the deaths in many ways: goodness, joy, kindness, cruelty, anger and grace. The book raises questions of racism, war, mental illness, forgiveness, despair, faith and redemption. Often in the face of despair, Nathan spoke quiet humble words of faith to the community helping us, as the reader, to begin to understand the awful grace of God. 

The action, characters, picturesque writing and the setting all enhance the story. The writing allows you to feel the depth of despair, the joy of life and ordinary grace of God. 

One question raised in the novel is, “Why does God let bad things happen to good people?” Ordinary Grace is a journey of that question. 

But it is Jake who offers us the most profound understanding of ordinary grace. “And that was it. A grace so ordinary that there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.” At the end of the novel, we glimpse in understanding the quote of what is ordinary grace. 

— Deb Krueger