Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson
Feeling too good about life? About your faith? About how nice it must be to live in the misty forests of the Pacific NorthWest? Are you just too chipper? This book, though excellent, and a good read, is the downer for you. It is a seriously sad book, about seriously flawed people, and by the way, it might make you either have more respect for, or entirely lose respect for – the Catholic church.
Thankfully as a well-grounded in reality kinda person, and a non-Catholic, the book was interesting, but not as thoroughly depressing as it might be for others. Set in the Oregon rainforest, in a former logging town of North Fork, where the rain is even steadier than normal, we find our main characters.
They include Ann, a teenaged runaway from a home that was never intact enough to accurately be called broken now, where she suffered neglect from her mother, abuse, and sexual abuse at the hands of her step-father. She’s a mushroomer along with others in the woods, and believes she has visions of – and conversations with – the Virgin Mary. The priest in town is young, and trying to hold his water-logged, moldy, and leaky church together. He is instinctively at odds with the older priest the Bishop sends to investigate, even though he is not sure of Ann’s claims, and fighting with himself as he tries to offer her care and comfort, as she is miserably sick as well as suffering from allergies. To this pair, add a logger whose life, business and marriage have fallen apart since an accident on the job left his son paralyzed, and an opportunistic, money-grabbing woman, Carolina, who “befriends” Ann, never believing in her visions, but willing to profit from them.
The locale is miserable, the people are, too, and yet it’s a good book, and a fascinating read. Ya just won’t want to move to the Oregon woods anytime soon after reading it.