Pulling Together

Three Little Things by Patti Stockdale is a marvellous heart-felt historical Christian novel based on the author’s maternal grandparent’s lives during World War I. Fact meets fiction in this story that is both sweet and powerful. It is sweet because of the love story and it is powerful because of the strength of characters.

The reader experiences WWI from the American perspective – on the home front, in a boot camp and in France. War touches all lives – those who go and those who remain behind.

Life is fragile, love is beautiful and loss is painful. “Those who grieve don’t carry around a calendar.” The novel deals not only with death in war but death in childhood gone by. It is “an ache [that] gnawed him daily.” Loss consumes us with survivor’s guilt. Why him and not me? What right do I have to be happy? We need to bring our guilt to God and learn to live again.