My Best Read in a month. (Attempt to avoid spoilers but be forewarned, discussion will include information from book.)

I’m not going to lie. I enjoy Mitch Albom’s fiction.

Albom’s work that I’m most familiar with includes considerations of faith: what is belief and what do we really believe in – people, an idea, a standard of behavior/ethical framework that guides us, a specific being, a relationship with that being… What forms faith, what challenges it, what destroys it?

In both this book and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Albom explores what happens to someone when they lose a close loved one, and this seems to be what he considers the breaking point where most people are likely to ‘lose’ faith.

What then would be necessary for them to reclaim that faith?

In Stranger there were some depictions of God that had me question my own assumptions about faith. It was a strong reminder that my beliefs are personal, individualized by my own experience. It was very interesting also, to see how Albom brought the different threads of his story together by the end. And just like The Five People you Meet in Heaven, I’ll be thinking about The Stranger in the Lifeboat for some time, recommending it to people who want a fairly quick but thoughtful read.