All the Way Home

April 29, 2002
Readers who are jaded and skeptical about the quality of Christian novels will find Tatlock's fictional exploration of racial discrimination, hatred and the human heart a fine example of the progress being made in the category. It's a memoir-like tale of Augusta "Augie" Schuler Callahan, an eight-year-old German-Irish girl growing up in California who, as the youngest of six in an abusive and alcoholic family, informally adopts Sunny Yamagata and her Japanese-American family as her own in the late 1930s. War soon separates Augie from her beloved friends, who are deported to an American internment camp for Japanese-Americans. After losing touch for 23 years, they meet again in Mississippi in the racially torn 1960s, where Sunny is working to establish voting rights for blacks. "Injustice is a funny thing... live long enough and you're going to get rained on," Sunny tells her friend, and as the story draws to a conclusion, they are challenged to make choices that reflect their own conflicts about race and forgiveness. Tatlock (A Room of My Own; A Place Called Morning) adeptly traces the girls' journey of faith with a light and sometimes humorous touch. She does an excellent job juxtaposing the horrors of Americans in Japanese hands and Japanese-Americans in the hands of their countrymen. Tatlock employs flashbacks efficiently, and her rich descriptions and characterizations are unusually fresh and inventive. Other Christian novelists would do well to emulate this quality contribution.