Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian
The best word to describe Gilead is peaceful. It is a slow-moving, meandering novel written as a letter from an elderly father to his young son, to be read when the son reaches adulthood. It recounts events from four generations of Ames living in Gilead, Iowa--primarily focusing on the fathers who have all been clergymen. Reverend John Ames writes to his son about his Abolitionist grandfather, who came to Iowa from Maine to fight slavery, and who served in the Civil War as a Union chaplain when he was fifty years old. Ames also describes his pacifist father who struggled to make peace with his own father, a polar opposite. He records details of his life in the present--observations about his young wife and son, internal turmoil about how to respond to his best friend's wayward son, and the process of aging and preparing for death. Over all of these threads is the narrator's beautifully expressed love for and appreciation of life as a precious gift. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and 2004 Book Critics Circle Award.
