Peace Like a River

Reuben Land narrates this tale, looking back on his childhood to remember when he and his sister and his father tracked his brother Davy--who has escaped from prison--across North Dakota to the Badlands. As Reuben tells the story, his sister Swede is composing her own precocious adventure yarn, in rhymed couplets, about the hero, Sunny Sundown, and a bandit named Valdez.

"[A]s clichéd as [Enger's] basic enterprise is, he manages to infuse sections of this novel with some surprisingly lively writing and deftly turned sentences. But ultimately the book suffers from a surplus of pretension...and a dearth of surprises. Enger's world, full of simple pleasures and populated by deep-thinking naïfs, seems unlikely to have ever existed, in this century or any other." - R. Wayne Walvoord (New York Times Book Review, 9/9/01)

"Enger writes on the precarious edge of traditionalism. He veers toward sentimentality, but the strength of his story and characters keeps his novel real....The miracle of PEACE LIKE A RIVER is the irresistibility of a well-told tale: you won't believe it, but this is what happened." - R. Wayne Walvoord (Ruminator Review, Fall 2001)

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