A Severe Mercy

Nope. I can't. I ended up skipping over most of the prologue because it kept putting me to sleep, and then after four or five pages where Vanauken exclusively talked about how his relationship with Davy was the most Special Relationship That Ever Specialed, I debated skipping the rest of chapter one as well. That tells me that I should just go ahead and set it down, which I did around page 30. I have nothing against relationships! But this took what could have been a great start to a romance (their meet-cute was kind of great) and made it DULL! (Part of this was Vanauken's writing style, which I did not like. There was so much useless information in every sentence, and the commas-per-sentence ratio was quite high.)

I don't even care that this is a book club book. I will happily go and sip my wine in silence while other people talk about it.

Such a moving story of love and loss, and coming to faith all along the way. It's also a lot of fun to read the correspondence between the author of this book and C. S. Lewis as they struck up a friendship.