Levi's Will

From Publishers Weekly In 1943, 19-year-old Will Mullet flees his pacifist Amish community of Apple Creek, Ohio, leaving behind a pregnant girl and a rigid, God-fearing home to find a new life. He enlists in the military, marries a southern belle and tries to erase every trace of his past. But he can't completely disengage from his roots, and nor, he belatedly discovers, does he want to. Levi, Will's father, is slow to accept the prodigal son. Decades pass, and as Will's life and relationship with his own children unfolds, "he begins to see that every man's failure dips its roots into the previous generation and drops its seeds into the next." Cramer shifts eras and narrative styles from chapter to chapter, sometimes following Will's life in the 1940s as a young single man, sometimes chronicling other decades leading up to and including the 1980s. Readers may be challenged by such time jumps, as well as the novel's multiple settings (Florida, Ohio, Europe) and numerous characters. Although it lacks some of the passion of his previous novel, Bad Ground, this quiet follow-up powerfully portrays the relationships between fathers and their children, the bitterness of rejection and the redeeming power of friendship, faith and forgiveness. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* Christian novels often mask as realistic, but the Evangelical Christian Publishing Association's code of purity, and the necessity to take the party line on doctrinal matters, is more likely to inspire propaganda than realism. Cramer vaults past such restrictions, however, with his story of a brooding young Amish man, Will Mullet, who in 1943 flees his home in Ohio. There's his pitiless father, Levi, who cannot be reasoned with, and a girlfriend, Mattie, whose pregnancy has caused Will to be banned. After knocking about on the road for a while, Will enlists, and irony of ironies for a pacifist, finds a home in the army. He's a good man but seems remote and intractable to his sons, and he's a difficult husband as well throughout his prickly but unbreakable marriage. (The confrontation between Will's wife, Helen, and a circle of judgmental Amish women is priceless.) As he grows older, Will tries to go home again but cannot; nor does his stubborn father mellow even a little. Yet in time there's forgiveness to be had, and wisdom, in this beautiful and original story that neither damns nor praises the Amish but simply presents them. This is accomplished work. John Mort Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Cramer simply tells the story, avoiding the temptation to neatly resolve every difficulty... " -- Christianity Today "Cramer's superb gift for concept and craft outdistances most contemporary writers and [the two] combine for a powerful story." -- Agape Press, July 2005 "His unique voice combines stark yet poetic terseness with poignant tenderness that can only emanate from the source of grace." -- Romantic Times, Aug. 2005 "I found myself reading... late [into] the night, unable to pull myself away from the compelling reality of this story." -- Focus on Fiction "LEVI'S WILL is one of those books that the reader comes away from with a contented sigh...." -- Romance Junkies "Perhaps his best... Cramer writes with profound simplicity, with poetic rhythm and with demonstrated insight... An incredibly heartwarming story." -- In the Library Review "The prose is often beautiful...a quiet novel, thought-provoking rather than a page-turner." -- FaithfulReader.com, June '05 "W. Dale Cramer, author of Levi's Will, proves himself a master storyteller... His prose is beautiful." -- Armchair Interviews "You will leave LEVI'S WILL knowing the people who live there and keeping them with you for a long time." -- Jackie Cooper, Author W. Dale Cramer is...a...premier writer of contemporary literary fiction... [He] catches humanity in all its fullness..." -- Heather Hunt, InFuzeMag.com W. Dale Cramer is a husband, father, jack-of-all-trades, and author of the highly acclaimed novels Sutter's Cross and Bad Ground as well as several published works of short fiction. He and his wife and two sons make their home in northern Georgia. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One January 1985 He reaches out, not quite awake yet, and his forearm comes to rest on the other pillow, cool and vacant, before he remembers where he is. It's a strange bed, not because it's a thousand miles from home, but because Helen isn't in it. Sitting up, rubbing his face, he thinks of calling her, but it's too early. After forty years he knows he will find no kindness in Helen at five o'clock in the morning. She's been known to cuss at that hour. There is no clock. He knows the time without turning on the light to look at his watch. All his life, as far back as he can remember, with or without an alarm clock, he has always awakened at five. There's a snap and a rumble when the gas furnace ignites and pumps warm air through the little mobile home as it has done often during the night, fending off the brunt of an Ohio winter. Still, the air is cold on his legs when he flings the covers back. He steps into the pants he left on the chair last night and pulls yesterday's sweater over his head. The floor is cold too. His feet slip into his shoes. Drawing back the curtain he sees the snow has stopped falling sometime in the night, and now the stars burn fiercely, as if the newly departed clouds had polished them in passing. The valley rests under an endless white comforter, a shroud of tangible silence quickened and sharpened in the glow of a crisp full moon hanging above the hilltops. The road in front of the trailer has disappeared during the night, and no grinding, clanking snowplow has yet come to break the landscape with a belt of salt and slush. Here in the country there are no streetlights to cast a pall of darkness beyond their own garish glow. The cold luminescence of a sea of moonlit snow is challenged only by the distant glint of yellow lamplight in the kitchen window of a farmhouse tucked in against the eastern hillside, where a thin ribbon of smoke stretches from stovepipe to stars. The barn is quiet, the cows out of sight. The trees are heavy with snow. Nothing moves. A deep sleep lies over the valley. He has come to bury his father. The event is a milestone for any manx97the falling of the last barrier before his own yawning mortalityx97but for Will McGruder it is more, having lost great chunks of his father in the tempest of his life, a tempest that with every passing year seems more preordained. Men are grass, he thinks. He stands very still at the window and lets his mind wander over the hills until, in a little while, he begins to merge with the night and the land. The aches and sorrows of his sixty-year-old body fall away and he ceases to be aware of himself as he is. The earthx97this particular earth, beneath the snowx97holds the memory of him as he was. The eyes of his mind see another night, another season, another valley. Excerpted from: Levi's Will by W. Dale Cramer Copyright © 2005; ISBN 0764229958 Published by Bethany House Publishers Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Read more