Picked by Kris - June 27th 2018 Meeting
“That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary 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.” New Bremen,
Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold
root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s
Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop
magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a
new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a
grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms.
Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.
Frank begins the season
preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy
unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister
father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister;
and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an
adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly
called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.
Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer,
Ordinary Grace
is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his
young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling
apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the
terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.
The President Is Missing confronts a threat so huge that it
jeopardizes not just Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street, but all of
America. Uncertainty and fear grip the nation. There are whispers of
cyberterror and espionage and a traitor in the Cabinet. Even the
President himself becomes a suspect, and then he disappears from public
view . . . 
