Ordinary Grace is a coming-of-age-novel about a thirteen year-old boy named Frank living in a small town in Minnesota in 1961. It covers the events of a summer marked by tragedy, in the form of accidents, suicide, and (possibly) murder. Frank’s father is the local minister, so he gets a front row seat to all of the heartbreak and pain in the community. Throughout the book, Frank comes face-to-face with the realities of life and death, and that terrible understanding that maybe the adults in his life don’t actually have it all together.
I read this book for book club, and then wasn’t able to make it to the book club meeting. I wish I had, because I really feel like I missed something in this book and would love to hear what other people got out of it. To me, it was just so relentlessly sad. It felt like one horrible thing after another kept happening to this small town and this unfortunate family. And I understand that sad things happen in real life, but I think part of the purpose of art is to help us to make sense of tragedy, and it didn’t really feel like this book did that. Krueger kind of gestured broadly at the importance of suffering in developing as a person, but it didn’t really seem like anyone in the book was any better off for having experienced these tragedies. There didn’t seem to be any themes of community supporting each other through tragedy, or learning how to cope with loss. It was just lots of sad things happening one after another. I will say that the prose is quite lovely; Krueger is definitely a readable author. I just didn’t get much out of this book beyond a sentence-level appreciation for the way the author uses words.
