9: The Prayer Box

I started this novel today...and read until I had finished it.  Just that good.

Lisa Wingate's The Prayer Box is about just that...80+ prayer boxes left behind by Iola Anne Poole and discovered by her tenant who has been asked to clean the house while legal issues are resolved concerning the house's ownership.  What a powerful idea:  prayer boxes.  More information here from the author about prayer boxes.

Main character Tandi and her children, running from a past and to a future, arrive in Rodanthe with little and gain a family, a background, a bond.  As Tandi works and reads the prayers, she grows into herself, finding grace, finding the desire, the strength to reveal yet save what meant so much to Iola Anne.

Wingate tells two tales via the genre of letter writing.  Via this letters, the reader takes Iola Anne's journey.  These are some of my favorite lines:

Yet amid all this, there is the water of grace...All in need of the water of grace from one another and from you...There is so much good.  So much grace.  So much pouring into the river.  A quiet water, this river of grace.  Its work done in ways that do not seek attention.  Yet it is there.  Always there.

Many lessons to learn from this novel; lessons that I want to experience, for I want to become a prayer box owner myself.

Upon completing the novel, I discovered the existence of a novella that goes back in time and sets the scene for this novel.  Now, I have to have it and the rest of the novellas and novels in this series!