When two local bullies break into the home of school caretaker Jeremiah Land wielding a baseball bat and looking for trouble, they find more of it than they ever expected. For seventeen-year-old Davy is sitting up in bed waiting for them with a Winchester rifle.
His asthmatic younger brother Reuben has often witnessed their father perform miracles: a praying man walks on air, a small pot supplies endless bowls of soup without ever becoming empty. But Jeremiah now seems as powerless to prevent Davy from being arrested for manslaughter as he is to ease Reuben's daily struggle for breath. Nor do Reuben and his brave, precocious young sister Swede have the resources to spring Davy from jail.
Yet break out is precisely what Davy does. He steals a horse and disappears. His family pile into their old car, towing a brand-new Airstream trailer, and track the outlaw into the harsh Dakota Badlands. Here, at the edge of the icy West, they take shelter with plain-faced, spellbinding Roxanna, whose great-uncle rode with the great Butch Cassidy. And here Reuben is confronted with a choice no boy of any age should have to make: the choice between a brother's freedom and an enemy's life.
Set in the 1960s, 'Peace Like A River' is that rare thing, a cotemporary novel with an epic dimension. It revels in the power of language and the legends of the West, and vibrates with the possibility of magic in the everyday world. Above all, it shows how family, love and faith can stand up to the most terrifying of enemies, the most tragic of fates.
