Title : Faith in Action
Language : English
Paperback : 38 pages
ISBN-10 : 164908997X
ISBN-13 : 978-1649089977
Item Weight : 2.72 ounces
Dimensions : 6 x 0.09 x 9 inches
A disjointed narrative lessens the emotional impact of Lois Lund’s autobiographical Faith in Action.
At the end of Faith in Action, author Lois Lund expresses her wish that readers would like her book and that its contents would help lift whatever heavy burden they may be suffering from. It is an earnest, clearly heartfelt wish; however, Lund’s work ultimately falls short of achieving this goal because of the narrative’s lack of focus and the failure of editorial oversight.
Things start off on a promising foot when Lund takes readers on a trip to the past and recounts her experiences of visiting family in Iowa. She paints a charming picture of her relatives and the kind of life they had living on a farm in the 1960s. When later she describes her home in Indiana, she is able to make scenes come to life with her words. It then becomes quite easy to get caught up in the nostalgia of her childhood memories. But this sense of cohesion in her story gradually unravels when she begins to jump around in her timeline and recounts incidents out of chronological order. She also tries to weave in the stories of some other folks and ends up creating a tangle of plotlines that a reader has to carefully parse through in order to fully comprehend what’s currently happening and who it’s happening to. This results in a jumbled narrative that’s made worse with a lack of editorial discipline as evidenced by the recurrence of identical passages that even the most lax proofreader should have easily spotted.
There are good ideas in Lois Lund’s Faith in Action. You can see the bones of a promising and emotional tale sprinkled throughout the prose with her mentions of a tragic personal incident and the mental illness she suffers from. Perhaps if she had been more interested in
telling an intimate story of her experiences instead of aiming to provide inspiration through her faith, this work would have been more uplifting.