Levi’s Will (Kindle Edition)
December 20th, 2010
From Publishers Weekly
In 1943, 19-year-old Will Mullet flees his pacifist Amish community of Apple Creek, Ohio, leaving behind a pregnant girl and a rigid, God-fearing home to find a new life. He enlists in the military, marries a southern belle and tries to erase every trace of his past. But he can’t completely disengage from his roots, and nor, he belatedly discovers, does he want to. Levi, Will’s father, is slow to accept the prodigal son. Decades pass, and as Will’s life and relationship with his own children unfolds, “he begins to see that every man’s failure dips its roots into the previous generation and drops its seeds into the next.” Cramer shifts eras and narrative styles from chapter to chapter, sometimes following Will’s life in the 1940s as a young single man, sometimes chronicling other decades leading up to and including the 1980s. Readers may be challenged by such time jumps, as well as the novel’s multiple settings (Florida, Ohio, Europe) and numerous characters. Although it lacks some of the passion of his previous novel, Bad Ground, this quiet follow-up powerfully portrays the relationships between fathers and their children, the bitterness of rejection and the redeeming power of friendship, faith and forgiveness.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Christian novels often mask as realistic, but the Evangelical Christian Publishing Association’s code of purity, and the necessity to take the party line on doctrinal matters, is more likely to inspire propaganda than realism. Cramer vaults past such restrictions, however, with his story of a brooding young Amish man, Will Mullet, who in 1943 flees his home in Ohio. There’s his pitiless father, Levi, who cannot be reasoned with, and a girlfriend, Mattie, whose pregnancy has caused Will to be banned. After knocking about on the road for a while, Will enlists, and irony of ironies for a pacifist, finds a home in the army. He’s a good man but seems remote and intractable to his sons, and he’s a difficult husband as well throughout his prickly but unbreakable marriage. (The confrontation between Will’s wife, Helen, and a circle of judgmental Amish women is priceless.) As he grows older, Will tries to go home again but cannot; nor does his stubborn father mellow even a little. Yet in time there’s forgiveness to be had, and wisdom, in this beautiful and original story that neither damns nor praises the Amish but simply presents them. This is accomplished work. John Mort
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
