Miracles happen

No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will.

Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

Miracles, like unlikely coincidences, are generally a turnoff in novels. If it's not a fairy tale, a fantasy or a fable, we want to believe what we are reading. Yet miracles are at the heart of Leif Enger's Peace Like a River (2001), and somehow we believe it.

The novel is narrated by Reuben Land, an 11-year-old boy with a serious asthma condition when the story takes place in the early 1960s. Abandoned by their mother, Reuben, an older brother named Davy and a younger sister called Swede are being raised by their devout father, Jeremiah, a school janitor.

The father catches two boys physically abusing a girl in the girls' locker room and beats them with a broom handle. The boys vow revenge and later kidnap Swede, though releasing her unharmed. Later they break into the Lands' home in the middle of the night, and Davy shoots and kills both of them with his hunting rifle.

Davy goes on trial, and a conviction seems likely. And Jeremiah loses his job. When Davy escapes from jail. federal authorities begin a manhunt for the teenage boy. Jeremiah acquires an Airstream and takes his family to North Dakota in the middle of a harsh winter in their own search for Davy, while a federal agent follows.

Enger gives his readers adventure and romance and some entertaining epic cowboy poetry written by Swede, as well as one miracle after another. Make of them what you will.