Search - Saint Maybe

Once again Anne Tyler does not disappoint. A great story with believable characters.

Very fun book - everyone will enjoy - good for vacation read.

I love Anne Tyler..this is one of her best family dramas..

This is one of Ann Tyler's most captivating books; full of emotion and a kind of magic. Her writing is articulate and her characters are quirky, yet ordinary people.

One terrible night, Ian Bedloe, 19, third child of cheerful Bee and agreeable Doug (one of those Tyler men who say, ``Well, now''), blurts out to brother Danny his suspicions about Danny's wife--bright-lipsticked, tiny-faced Lucy, mother of two by a divorced husband and of an infant (by Danny?). Danny, slightly drunk, drives off into a fatal accident; months later, sad and scatty Lucy dies also--after what was probably an accidental dose of sleeping pills. Clubbed by the horror of unbearable guilt, Ian is drawn to the storefront Church of the Second Chance, presided over by Reverend Emmett, undoubtedly God's agent--bony, magisterial, discovered later to be affectionately capricious. Reverend Emmett lays out the Way: forget college, provide for and rescue aging parents from the care of Lucy's kids (ages six, three, and baby) and ``set things right.'' Ian ``saw that he was beginning from scratch...as low as he could get.'' Years pass; Ian works as a carpenter leading a life of celibacy and service; kids mature and shape up. Where is that reward? Ian is ripe for a Sign. It comes, of course--as do love and a second chance. As always, Tyler's people--from powerless small children (whose ``every waking minute was scary'') to the electric, poignant Lucy to the crackly little church group--are as intensely real and yet ultimately unknowable as those who somehow have changed one's life.

I like Anne Tyler. and this book is an interesting tale of life choices and roads taken.

Wonderful story of an unconventional family and a man who spends his life trying to atone for a tragedy he believes he caused.

New York Time Notable Book of the Year - best of Anne Tyler. The unusual side story involving the Church of the Second Chance actually has something to tell us all - even those of us who are strict non-church goers.

In 1965, the happy Bedloe family is living an ideal, apple-pie existence in Baltimore. Then, in the blink of an eye, a single tragic event occurs that will transform their lives forever--particularly that of seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe, the youngest son, who blames himself for the sudden "accidental" death of his older brother.
Depressed and depleted, Ian is almost crushed under the weight of an unbearable, secret guilt. Then one crisp January evening, he catches sight of a window with glowing yellow neon, the CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE. He enters and soon discovers that forgiveness must be earned, through a bit of sacrifice and a lot of love....

Very interesting. The main character who is torn between living a normal life or that of raising his son's children is quite manages to also join a church that is almost cult like. Along the way he struggles with his decision and debates whether to become a priest, marry, be a father, and then live with the secret that he punishes himself with daily.