Good Hope Road » (Nal Accent Conversation Guide Included)

Lisa Wingate lives on a ranch with her husband and two children.

Twenty-year-old Jenilee Lane whose dreams are as narrow as the sky is wide, is the last person to expect anything good to come out of the tornado that rips across the Missouri farmland surrounding her home. But some inner spark compels her to rescue her elderly neighbor, Eudora Gibson, from the cellar in which she's been trapped. To make her way to the nearby town of Poetry, where the townspeople have begun to gather. To collect from the landscape letters, photographs, and mementos that might mean something to people who have lost everything. Brought close by tragedy, Jenilee and Eudora will learn lessons about the resilience of the human spirit and the ties that make a community strong. They will travel to a place they never would have imagined.

Claire Rosser - KLIATT

A tornado roars down Good Hope Road and changes the families living there forever. Jenilee is 21 years old, her life stunted by an abusive, drunken father, who has terrorized his family all of Jenilee's life. The father and Jenilee's teenage brother Nate are away at the time of the tornado, so Jenilee, alone, starts down the road after the disaster to a nearby neighbor. She saves this woman's life. Somehow they get to the town's makeshift shelter, where Jenilee joins the local vet (whom she had worked for) as he tries to help the injured because no doctor is available at first. Within a few days, many lives are changed. Some people find strength they didn't know they had; some are defeated; some find a way to be reconciled to enemies; some find a way to reject those who have been harmful to them. This is not a Pollyanna-ish story, yet it presents a strong view of how people can change for the better, how they are able to forgive and move on, how the broken can heal. It is set in the South, and some of the characters in it talk about their faith in God and their responsibility as Christians; they mention prayer as an everyday occurrence. Above all, it is the story of a disaster in this case a tornado that rips through a community, killing and injuring, uprooting lives. Wingate is a skilled writer who describes the wreckage to property and lives vividly. Jenilee is a strong heroine quietly so. She is a young woman who doesn't have any idea just how smart and efficient she is, because all her life she has been humiliated by her father. Yet, those years spent tending a dying mother, who loved her, and of mothering her little brother have prepared her for this latest disaster. And outsiderssee her for who she is and who she is capable of becoming. KLIATT Codes: JSA Recommended for junior and senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Penguin Putnam, New American Library, 284p.,