Prayers for Sale by Sandra Dallas

Summary and review:

Hennie Comfort is an eighty-six-year-old woman who has lived in Middle Swan, Colorado, a mining town situated high in the Rocky Mountains, since leaving Tennessee over 70 years ago. Hennie is, in many ways, the glue that holds the rough mining town together. Befriending everyone from the wife of the president of the mining company to the various "sorry girls" who entertain the men of Middle Swan. This story is about Hennie's friendship with Nit Spindle, a seventeen-year-old newlywed girl who has recently arrived in Middle Swan with her husband. Lonely in her new town and grieving over the loss of her baby, Nit is drawn to the sign hanging over Hennie's home, "Prayers for Sale." When she approaches Hennie to ask for a prayer, a deep friendship is born between the two women. Despite their differences in years, Nit and Hennie are drawn to each other by their love of quilting, their need for friendship, and the tragedies that they have each experienced. Throughout the book, Hennie unfolds the stories of Middle Swan to Nit, by doing so, she is able to confront the darkness of her past and embrace the future.

Sometimes I felt like I was looking at an early draft of the book. The stories that Hennie told seemed unfinished, since they were told without dialog and through the point of view of the third-person narrator. One of the themes in the book is Hennie's story-telling ability, but I never heard her voice in the stories. There were also a number of repetitions: we are reminded constantly that Hennie does not want to leave Middle Swan to live in Iowa with her daughter and that she has some unfinished business to take care of before she leaves. It is clear that Sandra Dallas knows quite a bit about both quilting and life in mining towns, but at times it seems like a little too much. There were places in the narrative that seemed to be trying to educate the reader, rather than telling a story and letting little facts about life in a mining town be gleaned along the way. For instance, on page 74, Hennie is perusing the shelves in the town's general store:

"Another shelf held the tin bins of spices and sultanas. The lettering identified them as sultanas yet, but most everybody called them raisins now, and they no longer had to be stoned."

I read these sentences and thought, "Hmm. I guess raisins used to be called sultanas. Now I know." Instead of fleshing out the atmosphere of the old store, the passage totally pulled me out of the story.

Hennie was maybe just a little bit too perfect, she didn't seem to have a single weakness. Giving Hennie a few more flaws would have made it easier to relate to her, but I didn't mind all that much. Instead, I just really wished that I were her neighbor. Although some of Hennie's stories were sad and dwelt on the darker side of human nature, this was a happy, comfortable book. It reminded me of being young and sitting in a spot of sunshine in the kitchen while watching my mom make cookies on a Saturday afternoon. This book won't change the course of literature, but it doesn't need to. ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ (7/10)

Content:

Blood and gore: The book talks about awful mining accidents and mentions several other deaths, mostly from natural causes. However there are a few murders, including murders of children.

Sex: Despite the presence of the town's "sorry women," there is very little in the way of sex.

Offensive Language: blasphemy and a few "minor" curse words