THE PAINTING

In Wilcox’s novel, a young woman re-examines her life after a traumatic car accident.

Young Allora Hughes is treated in the ICU after a serious car accident on the highway—a truck driving next to her blew a tire, causing her car to swerve and flip. Allora, who has degrees in art and business administration and considers herself an aspiring artist, had been distracted at the crucial moment by a message from her boyfriend, Trenton McCrohan, whose recent secretive behavior had led Allora to think he was cheating on her. The accident breaks her arm, injures her leg, and causes a head injury that prompts doctors to induce a coma. As she lies unconscious, Allora is attended at her bedside by her mother, Abby, and Abby’s new husband, Bill, plus many other well-wishers. Allora’s accident seems like horrible family history repeating itself; when she was a child, her father, Michael, died in a car crash. There’s one key difference: While in her coma, Allora believes she’s talking to God, who eventually tells her, “YOUR HEART HAS BEEN HEALED, AND YOU HAVE BEEN MADE WHOLE AGAIN” (God speaks in all-caps). She leaves the hospital a changed woman. The author adopts a very slow pace for telling this story, and readers will encounter the same beats several times as the chronology and narrative viewpoints shift. The story’s chief development—Allora’s new reality as a born-again Christian after her accident—is approached so gradually and fleshed out so deliberately that only sympathetic Christian readers are likely to find it page-turning stuff, although the slow blossoming of the second chance at happiness in Allora’s life is rendered with genuine empathy. The book’s sizable supporting cast is also well-drawn, particularly Allora’s endearing co-workers at her nonprofit.

A heartfelt but somewhat thin novel about family and Christian redemption.