Book Review: Lost December

My good friend Linda recently gave me a copy of Richard Paul Evans’ book Lost December, suggesting that I read it and pass it along to someone else when I was finished. It’s a compelling, simply told, modern-day presentation of the Prodigal Son story found in Luke 15. The main character is named Luke, and he warns readers in the Prologue that they won’t like him … but I did.

The only hard parts to read are the excruciating details of the young man’s financial demise at the hands of his “friends,” who lure him into distant countries where he (more they than he) wastes his trust-fund fortune in reckless and loose living, similar to the boy in the New Testament story. You know that he will not wake up from the nightmare until he is down to nothing, and in this case, he is left curled in a fetal position in a parking lot, bloody, all possessions gone except for the boxer shorts he happened to be wearing. All the friends are gone by this point too, as well as his father, whom he believes he has hurt and betrayed too severely for pardon.

Fortunately the book is divided almost exactly in half, with the first half recounting the dive to the bottom, and the second, the climb back to the top. Of course, the father is key to the story, and the costs to the father of his son’s decisions are more fully drawn than in the Bible story. A lot of elements are more fully drawn in Evans’ account, and that is the strength of this book, which shows how this ancient Biblical story could actually happen in modern-day settings with modern-day people. And the portrayal of kindness and aid from the man who saves Luke from probable death is so well drawn that it made me wonder why the Bible story had no such person but only a briefly mentioned hog farmer who allowed the boy to feed the swine.

The long-anticipated reunion with the father does, of course, occur, but I have to say that the sweet scent of hope that rises out of this book stems more from the attitudes and behaviors of Luke as he gets his feet back under him than from anything else. That sense of hopefulness alone makes this book worth reading.

Thank you, Linda.