Prayers for Sale

Categories: Fiction

In the mood for something nice and old-fashioned? Sandra Dallas’s new book, Prayers for Sale, will fit the bill.

Hennie Comfort is an elderly woman living in the Colorado mining town of Middle Swan in the 1930s. A young woman stops by her house and asks Hennie to pray for her, having seen the sign, "Prayers for Sale," that Hennie’s husband jokingly put up on their fence years before to celebrate the fact that they had nothing to pray for themselves.

The girl, Nit Spindle, is new to town, lonesome and still grieving for her dead baby. Since Hennie herself arrived in town in that condition in her own youth, she decides to befriend the girl. Sharing her quilts, sharing her cooking, and above all sharing her decades of stories, she helps Nit settle in. And in the process she settles herself, too, finally letting go of an old secret sorrow.

If you like stories of women’s lives, you’ll find this comfortably appealing. Then try Nancy E. Turner’s These Is My Words and its sequels, more sweet and sturdy historical fiction with a real sense of what life was like for our grandmothers’ grandmothers.