Evans, Richard Paul: Grace
Grace
Writer: Richard Paul Evans
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 307
So I got Evans's 2008 offering for Christmas and decided that rather than waiting a year and letting the previous offering sour any longer, I'd go ahead and read the latest. Turns out, that was the right choice to make.
The premise: Eric doesn't really know what he's getting into when he helps a girl from his Spanish class runaway. He finds her shelter, makes certain she has food, and even falls in love with her, but soon the news of her disappearance is all over the news, and she refuses to go back home. Grace has secrets of her own, secrets she fears, and secrets she has a right to fear. She can see the future in the flame of a candle, and knows exactly what's ahead of her. Eric doesn't.
Spoilers ahead.
This was an interesting tale from Evans. More often than not, readers are guaranteed a happy ending and a predictable romance, but that wasn't the case here. Oh, the reader knew that fourteen-year-old Eric would fall in love with Grace and her him, but Grace's circumstances and her history ensured that any future together would be impossible.
I figured out pretty fast that Grace's stepfather had been sexually abusing her. I also guessed fast that she was pregnant. What I didn't know was how the tale would end, and whether or not Eric would get "caught" for helping her out. For a time, I thought things might work out as best they could: Grace had contacted her aunt and was leaving Friday, which meant Eric wouldn't have to worry about people discovering her. Only somehow, the police got a tip about where Grace was staying and she was discovered beforehand, and once she was in the hands of her parents, her stepfather killed her.
This is a tough story for a couple of reasons. The first being the all-too-real element of abuse and people's way of turning a blind eye. Evans was right to set this in the past during a time when child abuse was pretty much ignored, because it would've been very, very hard for me to stomach this story if it took place in today's society. I have a hard enough time with the fact it doesn't appear that Grace told the police the truth about her condition: about her pregnancy and her step-father raping her. Or maybe she did and the police didn't believe her and took her home anyway and her step-father murdered her for that. Or maybe he murdered her, aside from just being a psycho, of course, because when she came home, she was clearly pregnant.
I don't know. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about not knowing. But I do know that I'm annoyed that we don't know who blew the whistle on where Grace was staying. There's two suspects:
1) Dean. He saw the poster of Grace in the restaurant and knew Eric was the last guy she was with. It'd make sense if he was the culprit just to piss on whatever parade he thought Eric was having, but I would've really liked some kind of closure in this regard: Dean's sub-plot was built enough to warrant one, and I would've liked to see Eric beat his ass for what happened. After all, no one knew the outcome of Grace being found, and it would've been great to see the guilt written all over Dean's face for his participation in her murder, so to speak.
2) Grace herself. She DID know the future, thanks to the candles, and she lied about her stepfather being gone. My guess is she knew her future and knew that there wasn't any point in putting it off, so she turned herself in after a fashion. Which would've made the story about her aunt a lie.
But I'm not sure how I feel about this. I feel that if this was the truth, then she would've left some kind of note for Eric so he wouldn't beat himself up, but she didn't, which makes me think she wasn't that suicidal, and that her aunt really was coming to help. But we never saw the aunt at the funeral either, so who knows.
The point is, not knowing bugs me. It makes the plot feel a little contrived, like Evans was intentionally refusing the reader a happy ending. Not that I mind not having a happy ending, but still. I like my plots to be organic, and knowing who called the cops and why is pretty important to me as a reader. I think it would've given Eric a proper sense of closure, not that scene with his mom where she tells him the only person to blame is the step-father, who yes, IS THE GUILTY ONE, but whoever made that call, that person shares the guilt too. I understood Eric's anger at his parents and himself and the guilt, and she was right to console him, but I wanted that little bit of closure. Just a little.
Such a closure wouldn't have taken away from Eric's future either. I liked that his experience with Grace drove him to prosecute those like her step-father and to help abused children. It also led nicely into the author's own plea for the organization he's set up to help foster children in the real world, and all that's good stuff.
The book is good, but that one question bugs me. Maybe I missed something in the speed of my reading, but as far as I'm concerned, that's one unanswered question that needs answering.
My Rating
Worth the Cash: much better than The Gift. This tale has a little more meat on the bones and a little more meaning, if that makes sense. It's inspirational as well as it is, well, educational in that Evans sits down to look at child abuse and tell a reader a story that's realistic and also moving. I always forget that Evans is involved in several charities, and the one he mentions at the end of this book, Operation Kids is certainly worth considering for those readers who want to help abused children find/make a better life. That's what this fictional tale was about, and while the ending is bittersweet, it points out that life doesn't always have to end that way.
Next up:
Magic Lost, Trouble Found by Lisa Searin