Peace Like a River

This book is just an incredible story and extremely well done. I loved the first person narrator and the characters were great. The audiobook was incredible. The story was a bit slow moving and not entirely captivating for me. It's one of those books that I appreciate more objectively (definitely agree with it being a modern classic!) than I love it subjectively.

In a lot of ways this book reminded me of To Kill A Mockingbird, it wasn't so forth coming with a social message like To Kill A Mockingbird, which is perhaps why I would say it's not quite on that level but still a very, very well written book that really drew me into the lives of this small family.

It was due back to the library, so I had to hurry! 3.5 stars. Took a while to get into, but then I got a lot more engaged (especially once I started skipping over Swede's unrealistic poetry and cowboy stories). Also, a lot of this is set in the North Dakota Badlands, and once upon a time Matt was considering taking a job in North Dakota and BOY HOWDY am I glad that did not pan out! The descriptions of snow, ice, being cold, cold rooms, horses tromping through crusty waist-high frost, being buried in quilts to no effect, plows not being able to get through six feet of snowfall in one night... I would not have survived there.

Anyway, I enjoyed the story of Reuben, Swede and Davy, Dad and Roxanna.