Book Review: The Prayer Box by Lisa Wingate

Reason for Reading: This was a pick from my mom's book club.


Synopsis from Amazon: When Iola Anne Poole, an old-timer on Hatteras Island, passes away in her bed at ninety-one, the struggling young mother in her rental cottage, Tandi Jo Reese, finds herself charged with the task of cleaning out Iola's rambling Victorian house.

Running from a messy, dangerous past, Tandi never expects to find more than a temporary hiding place within Iola's walls, but everything changes with the discovery of eighty-one carefully decorated prayer boxes, one for each year, spanning from Iola's youth to her last days. Hidden in the boxes is the story of a lifetime, written on random bits of paper--the hopes and wishes, fears and thoughts of an unassuming but complex woman passing through the seasons of an extraordinary, unsung life filled with journeys of faith, observations on love, and one final lesson that could change everything for Tandi.

Review:  I really enjoyed this book. At first I was a little annoyed at Tandi. She'd obviously run from some bad decisions she had made in her past but she seemed doomed to repeat them at this new place. And that frustrated me tremendously. But as she found the letters and made some new friendships in the town she began to actually make some changes and I began to understand her better. I thought the author did a good job weaving back and forth from the letters to the present day as well as tying in Tandi's past along with Iola Anne's.

The only thing that bothered me in the book was the tendency to bring something up and then go on a tangent for longer than I would've liked before returning to the topic at hand. But either she started doing it less, or I stopped noticing it as much because I don't remember it happening at the end near as much as at the beginning of the book.

Overall I give this 4/5 stars.