It’s always somebody else’s kid–until it’s yours.When Katherine James and her husband found out their son was using heroin, their responses ran the gamut: disbelief, anger, helplessness, guilt. As they struggled to come to grips with their son’s addiction and decide how best to help him, their home became a refuge for an unlikely assortment of their son’s friends, each with their own story, … drawn by the simple love and acceptance they found there–“the Lost Boys,” James calls them.In this sensitive, vulnerable memoir, award-winning novelist James turns her lush prose to a new purpose: to tell her family’s story through the twists and turns of her son’s addiction, overdose, and slow recovery. The result is not just a look at the phenomenon of drug abuse in suburban America, but also a meditation on the particular anguish of loving a wayward child and clinging to a desperate trust in God’s providence through it all.
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Kate James has done something most unusual. In her riveting memoir about her son’s life-and-death battle with heroin, she captivates your heart and educates you at the same time. Every chapter left me eager for more. Spiritual, yet far from preachy, James created a powerful combination of raw authenticity with hope-filled truth. A Prayer for Orion promises to enlighten the reader while giving hope to weary parents who are walking a similar path.
Baldly, bravely, beautifully told, A Prayer for Orion invites readers to see faith in its lived-in condition, how it can traffic in confusion as much as confidence. As Kate James understands from her son’s story of addiction, to know God is not to be spared the grief of this broken world. It is, however, to watch hope ― as small and inconspicuous as Elijah’s cloud ― grow heavier with rain. Inviting us to surrender every what if? for the settled peace of even if, this book is for everyone struggling to love someone well.
I’d read the phone book if Katherine James wrote it. Thankfully, she chooses better topics, or do they choose her? Either way, A Prayer for Orion is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. It reminded me of those familiar words by Frederick Buechner: ‘Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.’ Artists like James help us fight the fear. They shape terrible things so that we can see their beauty, and they pare beauty back to an almost terrifying intensity. Having read this book, I accept that the world is more frightening even than I suspected. But having read this book, I am more certain there is a light that darkness cannot overcome. A Prayer for Orion tells a terrifying tale, but tells it with such precision, elegance, and honesty, that it left me hopeful and unafraid.
Touch this book carefully, readers. It may burn you.
Receive it tenderly. It’s made of mother heart.
Hold it with both hands. It bucks.
Read it with full attention. It’s a radiant witness to the grace and nearness of the living God.
The story is a nightmare. A testimony. A guide.
And author Katherine James weaves you through all three in this harrowing, redemptive memoir: A Prayer for Orion. In raw, limber prose she tells how her third child, Sweetboy, slid into the crevasse of heroin addiction. How she and her husband responded. How they felt. What happened next.
You may be tempted to escape the pain of this heart-rending story with judgment. I know, I know. It’s easier to stomach a terrible tale if you imagine you’d have avoided it all, had it been you. If you believe you could have controlled your child to safety with a new location or better friends or wiser parenting or more insight or deeper faith or a healthier diet . . . or . . . or . . . or . . .
Really?
If you disappear into rational, formula-driven solutions in order to dodge the book’s ugliness and sorrow, you’ll miss the rescue, the holy intervention, the healing. You’ll miss the humbling wonder of lives transformed by the only Rope long enough to pull Sweetboy from darkness and resuscitate him—and his parents.
I suggest you read it with mercy, instead. With a recognition that there, but for God’s grace—or in the midst of it—you and your child could have been. As I could have been with mine.