The Painted Table
The table’s journey began in nineteenth-century Norway, then it was brought to the Dust Bowl–era prairie by Joann’s father and mother. Joann often found refuge under the table, and it was there that she and her siblings hid one frightful afternoon as a prairie fire threatened their lives and livelihood. The event haunts her for the rest of her life, inducing her to paint the table over and over again in fits of madness. Growing up in the shadow of her mother’s illness, Saffee learns to fear the world around her and comes to detest the table as a symbol of her mother’s instability. But as Saffee begins her adult life, she is given a chance to face the past and leave her fears behind if she can first face the symbol of the table. Spanning four generations, the table follows a family’s history of mental illness and its triumph over it. Saffee’s story is insightful and touching and, reading in places like a Christian how-to, will especially appeal to devotional readers. --Cortney Ophoff