Book Review: Innocents Pray

Innocents Pray. Lisa J. Lickel. Lisa Lickel Publishing, September 1, 2016, Trade Paperback and Kindle, 340 pages. 

Reviewed by Gail Galvan.

Innocents Pray reads like a literary tapestry laced with entangled chance encounters, Catholicism, human conflicts, and deadly disease issues. Libby, the central character, is stricken with cancer—for the second time—and must come to terms with just how and when she will deal with her medical crisis. Add a family to the dynamics of the story, and, of course, the plot thickens. Libby’s husband, Vic, is often working out of town. Nona belongs to the family as a caregiver for Libby and teenage son, Jordan, who is estranged from his mother and acts as if he wants nothing to do with her.

Libby knows it was not her disease that initially caused the friction between the two of them. “I had always held him at arm’s length, I realized, like some Victorian parent who only spent time with her child when the nanny brought him for an hour each afternoon. I was at fault for not bonding as other mothers did. I loved him, but I let go of him too early, afraid of the pain of losing him if anything bad happened, as I had lost my mother.” It’s evident early on that Jordan is a troubled teenager, and here is fair warning—things do not get better.

A chance meeting on an airplane between Libby’s husband and Able, a hospice chaplain, begins a series of strange connections. Soon, Libby decides to spare her family the agony of watching her decline, so she runs off to find a place to spend her final days alone and unattached.

In most stories, a reader can see things coming, but I must admit the author caught me off guard several times. From controversial medical treatments for cancer to extremely disturbing events, Innocents Pray kept me on edge to the very end.

The author gives the book a modern tone with the use of journal writing by Jordan and the Internet web chats that Libby visits. The spiritual element of the story includes scriptures and references to Catholicism, which are prevalent and cited throughout. The religious overtones and life and death contemplations are interesting, even intriguing.

Lickel weaves her themes well and does not take the easy road when she leads us to the collisions of people, choices, and consequences. It certainly was not an easy read, focused as it is on the all too familiar, tough, and far-reaching fight that cancer thrusts upon its victims, but it was a good read and dealt with many tough questions regarding the challenging disease.

At the end of the book, the author provides interesting discussion questions and some pertinent resource sites that make for a more soothing ending.