SEVENTY TIMES SEVEN

The lives of a handful of strangers intertwine in this novel of forgiveness and renewal.

Moore organizes her book into several parallel narrative strands, each revolving around one of her small group of central characters. First, readers meet Merisela when she’s a teenager working at the Taco Snack Shop in the Mexican village of Playa Orma, “a beach resort glued onto a poverty-stricken fishing village,” and being sexually abused by her stepfather, Jose. Readers also encounter Mike Edgerton, who shows some promise as a baseball pitcher in school despite his impoverished background (“I didn’t think they’d let kids from that development play in the league,” he overhears somebody say. “I’ve heard the place is crawling with drugs”). But Mike is shortly in jail on manslaughter charges; there, he meets good-hearted social worker Keaton Thomas. The book’s most involving character is Maria Rojas, who gives up a thriving dental practice in Mexico to immigrate to Toronto with her husband, Eduardo. But he abruptly leaves her and their four children for another woman, forcing Maria to register for welfare. In alternating chapters, Moore follows these characters and others as they navigate small triumphs and one series of setbacks after another, each segment told with an appealing reserve and a good ear for dialogue. While her players often suffer life-changing difficulties, the author never descends into bathos, and the result is that their struggles seem all the more believable for being underdramatized. The eventual plot resolutions, including the central and glowingly optimistic one, are effectively rendered. Issues like immigration, domestic abuse, and inequality percolate beneath the surface of these separate stories, but the overall narrative is dominated by themes of endurance and redemption (foreshadowed in the book title’s reference to the Gospel of St. Matthew’s call for forgiveness). These themes feel very real when embodied by these well-realized characters—who become even more intriguing as they begin interacting with one another.

A readable and involving tale about several characters finding new directions in life.