House of Prayer No. 2

Title: House of Prayer No. 2
Author: Mark Richard
Pub Date: 2011
Genre: Memoir
Nutshell: A writer's story of his childhood in the south and his life before becoming a writer

This is a guy very obviously influenced by William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and the other big American writers, especially the southern ones. That's not a bad thing, mind. Richard's writing is definitely of a style, but not hard to read or uninteresting. 

He tells his story from the beginning, growing up in Texas and Virginia as a "special" child with deformed hips. He details his repeated visits to the crippled children's hospital, where surgeons hammered nails into his bones and predicted he would be in a wheelchair by 30. He writes about his friends, the petty crimes they engaged in, the adventures they had, his troubled father and his Catholic mother. In the end, he talks about deciding to become a writer, his crisis of faith and eventual return to the church. 

This is in many ways a story of faith, but in others just the story of a southern kid who becomes a writer, because Richard's early life is certainly something less than holy. It is not a preachy book, and there's plenty to recommend it even for those who aren't necessarily looking for a narrative on religion. If you like the memoir genre and are particularly drawn to the sort of masculine, southern style writing you find in a lot of the American classics, you will probably find this enjoyable.