Don’t believe me? First, you have your wise and slightly aloof father figure.

That’s right Ordinary Grace is the literary equivalent of Oscar bait. I hesitate to even call them spoilers, though, because Krueger foreshadows each “plot twist” with the weight of an anvil, so that halfway through the book it’s already blatantly obvious how every loose end will be tied.

If this sort of thing intrigues you, please don’t read ahead, as spoilers will be mentioned.

In that sense, I suppose you could in fairness call it an American classic. The reason Ordinary Grace feels so much like a classic is because it steals everything that remotely smells like Pulitzer material from those classics that have already been canonized and throws it all together into one giant melting pot of tropes and contrivances. There is scant little about this book that Krueger can in good conscience call original content. There’s all the southern spunk and tomboy fun of Tom Sawyer, the gritty undertones of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and plot twists I didn’t even enjoy when Willa Cather used them. Frank Drum’s saintly father looks far too much like Mockingbird‘s Atticus, and once you realize that, it’s easy to see that Frank himself is just Jem Finch in disguise. Ordinary Grace rips pages out of various timeless classics and patches them all together again to create something Krueger hopes readers will mistake for his own. Do you find yourself recalling titles from your high school reading list like To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Sawyer, East of Eden, or My Antonia? There’s a reason for that, too. Over the span of one summer, Frank and his stuttering kid brother, Jake, experience a crippling wave of deaths and tragedies in their community that force them to discover together the “awful grace of God.”ĭoes the synopsis sounds familiar? There’s a reason for that. Set in small-town New Bremen, Minnesota in the summer of ’61, Ordinary Grace is the coming-of-age tale of 13-year-old Frank Drum, the son of a Methodist pastor and a wildly artistic mother with the voice of an angel. Allusions from critics to the likes of To Kill a Mockingbird. Predictions like “destined to be hailed as a classic work of literature.” In what has now become my refrain when picking up new books, stubbornly naïve as I am, I found myself thinking, what could go wrong? Gushing accolades from the likes of Dennis Lehane. Now, from the outset this book seems to have everything going for it. One of the greatest literary cons of our time. We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed. And what I know from my studies and from my life is that there is no such thing as a true event.

Ordinary grace