pileofgreybooks: a book ring

You may or may not know this, but I am always suspicious of coming of age novels. Not that there's anything wrong with them in theory, but I've felt that at times people use the "coming of age" genre a little too often, giving them license to wander the pages pointlessly and have sloppy editing choices. I don't keep this suspicion from reading them, however; the novel was about Mennonites and a very dear friend sent this to me all the way from that distant land called Canada, so I had two very good reasons to try this one on. The pace of the novel was slow to me at first, but I found myself falling in with the flow later on and enjoying the ride. There was a lot of negativity about Mennonites in it, which annoyed me a little. I mean, there's a lot to be desired, but goodness! But the story was set in a very small town, so a lot of cultish things can happen there which is more or less nonexistant in other places. The pastor of a nameless Mennonite church recently gave a sermon stating that the priesthood of believers concept with regards to church leadership wasn't valid, and that anyone who disagreed with said leadership was "of the devil." So, maybe the narrator, Nomi (I love her name) wasn't so off the mark. The father, Ray, is a desperate loving character who slowly sells all the family's furniture--by far the best drawn one in this work. I don't understand Nomi very well, but she's 16--and who can really understand 16 year olds--I didn't even understand them at that age. The mother (who, not to give away too much, is excommunicated aka shunned from the Mennonite church) is a bit mystical, but she has gone missing, which makes her more of a dream to Nomi than reality. The reason her mother is shunned is only revealed in the final pages of the book, in a little too quick tying up the knots sort of way, that makes sense in some ways but not in others.