Claudia, a middle-aged widow, tries to fulfill her husband’s last request by driving to Memphis with an eccentric aunt and a moody teenager to find the rightful owner of an unwieldy bust of Elvis. As on any fictional road trip, secrets past and present surface and relationships evolve.
Unfortunately, the story is told with more similes than subtlety, and large swaths of the plot consist solely of flashbacks and Claudia’s unremarkable first-person thought life. The characters leave sentences unfinished and withhold information to approximate suspense, but most of the big revelations and emotional whammies can be seen coming hundreds of pages away. Ellis incorporates “God-talk” into this Christian novel naturally enough, but it lacks inspiration; characters take turns wondering aloud about theodicy and telling each other to content themselves without the answers and just believe.
