michael markee

A coming of age story that takes place in a small town in Oregon in the early 1950s in the shadow of World War Two involving a group of fourteen year old boys, all sons of World War Two veterans and their story is complicated by a soldier cousin who visits and falls in love with a young pacifist Mennonite girl just as he is to be shipped off to The Korean War. The infraction of a religious taboo affects not only the families involved in the love affair, but also the community family. The novel begins with a bomb carelessly being dropped in the Mennonite Church that tests four young boys and evenually an entire community's ability to cope with patriotism, religious freedom, love and hate, courage, forgiving and death.