Hellenga is an english Professor at Knox College, Galesburg, IL. I think he's a very good writer. This is the story about a college professor and his family and how the death of a child turns their lives around. I thought this was a very good book with good character study of the family.

I read this book long before 9/11, but I wish it had been published after that horrible tragedy, as more people would have read it to help them deal with their emotional reaction. Hellenga covers the different ways the members of a family react after one of the children is killed in a random bombing in Italy. I really identified with the father, who tried to understand what happened and make some kind of sense out of something that was absolutely incomprehensible.

don't really know what I was expecting from this book, but it was nothing like I expected...the characters were whiny for the most part, and the plot (such as it was) didn't really pick up till the second half.

Another of my favorites...story of a man whose daughter is killed in Italy by terrorists.