Book Review by
Peggy Eastman
It is difficult to
write fiction with a message, for the author runs the
risk of sounding like a propagandist, not a novelist.
But fiction has the ability to engage our feelings
about issues of social justice in a way that
non-fiction does not: witness the enduring popularity
of Charles Dickens, whose novels dramatize the horrors
of poverty, class discrimination and child labor in
19th century English society.
In Holy Innocents, Bill Kassel has crafted an
imaginative mystery centered around the death of a
baby found in a trash can, and explored the issue of
abortion with fictional characters whose pain,
confusion, earnestness, complexity and mistakes seem
very real and very human. The novel has food dialogue
and humor and light touches in appropriate places. How
refreshing it is to read an unpreachy novel on a
terrible happening whose major thread is recognition
that we are all sinners who can be redeemed, and whose
tone is one of unsentimental compassion. The book is
unabashedly pro-life, but it condemns no one. As the
old priest Father Karl suggests in a homily, abortion
doesn't exist in a vacuum.
The action revolves
around a shut-down Catholic school, Holy Innocents, in
a small midwestern town. When a dead baby in a grocery
sack is found in the boys' bathroom, the incident
exposes the small-town passions, jealousies, factions
and suffering that have intrigued novelists for
generations - from Sinclair Lewis to Thomas Wolfe to
the contemporary writer Richard Russo.
Holy
Innocents is
ultimately a hopeful novel. It shows a young minister
and an old priest with a shadowed past overcoming
suspicion and distrust to work together in a climate
of mutual respect. The book holds out the hope that
people of different faiths can look beyond their own
agendas and cooperate to achieve a common goal for the
good of the community they all love.
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