By GRADE Elementary School Middle School High Schoolīy AGE Board Books (newborn to age 3) Early Childhood Readers (ages 4-8) Children's Picture Books (ages 3-8) Juvenile Fiction (ages 8-12) Young Adult Fiction (ages 12+).BESTSELLERS in EDUCATION Shop All Education Books.Overwhelmed with checking his own despair, Jacob begins by pondering how to halt wickedness and ineluctably finds himself sustaining its slow creep.
It forces us to consider at what remove we truly are from evil. The novel is, at root, spiritually terrifying. O'Nan's style is taut and often oddly lovely, its immediacy braced by an unnerving second-person voice. "Is this the devil's work?" Jacob asks as he struggles to discern the good in a world without order, watches those he serves turn against him, and disregards his own moral outrage. When panic erupts, however, and he grapples with the tragedies accumulating before him, he feels the prick of spiritual doubt, even succumbs to violence. Yet even as his wife and baby fall ill, Jacob patiently, dutifully tends to the helpless and buries the dead. "When won't faith save you?" Jacob wonders the silence soon deafens him.Īn ostensibly inured Civil War veteran, Jacob watches helplessly as his neighbors in tiny Friendship, Wisconsin, are stricken with disease: simply hearing a mother say of her daughter, "She's sick," becomes chilling.
When his town's sleepy summer tranquility is shattered by an outbreak of diphtheria, Jacob Hansen-constable, deacon, and undertaker-stares at an impossible dilemma: save both himself and his family or observe his many duties? Although he's nearly convinced that it's possible to do both, the inexorable and crushing horror of Stewart O'Nan's fifth novel, A Prayer for the Dying, is that evil doesn't flinch, that its insistence can obliterate goodness, corrupt humility.
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