Shadows in the Mind’s Eye
Sam returns from WWII to rural Arkansas, excited to reunite with his wife, Annie, and their daughter, Rosie, but their reunion does not go as smoothly, nor is his integration into his old life as seamless, as he’d hoped. Sam has flashbacks and can’t always be certain whether what he’s seeing is real or just in his mind. Even worse, he proves himself capable of hurting his beloved Annie when in the grip of a flashback. And nobody believes him when he claims to see strange men near the sorting shed on his property engaging in possibly illegal activities that could endanger the lives of his family members.
Tromp cleverly sets up the mystery of whether the secondary characters in the novel are what they seem or whether Sam has grounds for his suspicions. As soon as I was certain that Sam was hallucinating because of his PTSD, something would happen to make me change my mind and believe that what he sees is real. Thus, Annie’s similar uncertainty about Sam is convincing.
The pace is slow and uneven in the first half of the book, but the second half makes up for it with plenty of excitement and mystery, which is solved in a satisfying way. Occasionally I found the dialect too heavy, jarring me out of the story. The novel is marketed as Christian fiction, but the mentions of God and spiritual things are applied with a light hand, so it would appeal equally to a secular readership. This is a heartwarming book that offers hope and healing for wounded people.
