Paperback review: Sufficient Grace, by Amy Espeseth

Amy Espeseth’s atmospheric debut novel is set in a fundamentalist Christian community in rural Wisconsin. At its centre is Ruth, a young girl immersed in the rhythms of nature and prayer. When her cousin, Naomi, confides a potentially explosive secret, Ruth vows to protect her. Though Ruth’s voice is beautifully captured, the narrative develops into a disappointing melodrama. By the end, the family’s hard-line faith has come to seem oddly extraneous to the plot.

But Espeseth’s poetic descriptions can be stunning: a coyote “with thick yellow-grey fur like an overcast sky and a drooping-down tail, tip dipped in ink”; a thunderstorm that makes “shadows run together to form buckets of dark”.