Lisa Lickel has done it again. She’s crafted another
novel with a unique concept and characters as interesting and troubling as the
concept itself. Innocents Pray asks
the question, if four people are praying
for different answers to the same situation, how will God answer all of them?
Lisa’s story is disturbing on several levels – from the
woman who goes away to die without telling her family what she’s doing, to the
doctor creating his own version of medical ethics, to the son who is described
on the back cover as “a whisper from the edge of reason”, to the conflicted
hospice chaplain with a connection to each. Each individual is struggling with
a huge internal conflict and question for which there is no pat answer, and
wondering how the story can possibly end is what keeps us turning the pages.
The characters themselves are often not very likeable, yet so real in the ways
they are troubled that we care for them in their brokenness.
Lisa tends to write from a variety of interesting
points of view, which creates a much more fascinating web than if this story had only been written from the viewpoints of,
say, the MC who has cancer or Able, the hospice chaplain whose integrity is at
odds with what he is being asked to do. She deftly goes between their points of
view in first person, third person, and from a mysterious interchange on a
weblog that keeps us guessing as to who is hosting and playing devil’s advocate
on the site.
I would view Innocents
Pray as a both literary and experimental women’s fiction, and Lisa is up to
the task of presenting it to her readers. If there is anything critical, it
would be that there was a time or two I felt slightly uncertain if I was
understanding a particular relationship (near the end) clearly (that might have been me).
Intriguing on an eerily realistic level!
