The ultimate act of forgiveness

Could you find it in yourself to forgive someone who murdered your child? Or would you be so consumed by the lust for revenge that your ability to lead a normal life would be incapacitated?

Those questions are at the heart of "The Crying Tree," the award-winning debut novel by Naseem Rakha, a broadcast journalist who lives near Salem. On Thursday, the same night the Blazers were being bounced out of the NBA playoffs, about 40 of us book-lovers crowded into Annie Bloom's Books to hear Naseem discuss her novel and accept a 2010 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association award for it.

It's a searing piece of work that moves quickly through the events that lead to the death of 15-year-old Shep, then dwells on the central questions through the eyes of each of the major characters: parents Irene and Nate Stanley; younger sister Bliss; the prison superintendent, Tab Mason; and the killer himself, Daniel Robbin.

Shep is a sensitive, nature-loving boy who is killed during an apparent robbery in the family's home in Oregon's high desert. His death absolutely shatters his mother and drives his taciturn father even further into isolated silence while his sister, just wanting a normal adolescence, copes with being overlooked. The prison superintendent, himself brutalized as a young boy by a family member, wrestles with the complications of planning an execution. And the killer? He wants to die and forsakes any move to appeal his death sentence.

Over and over, in elegant prose and true-to-life dialogue, the book asks readers to consider, "What is justice?" In these circumstances, a welter of emotions arise: grief, pain, despair, regret and retribution. Shep's death threatens to drive permanent wedges between his surviving family members, even after they move back to the southern Illinois farm they left in order to move to Oregon so Nate could take a job as a deputy sheriff.

Irene, unable to get past the loss of her son, eventually comes to a realization that she will never move forward without confronting the source of her all-consuming pain. And, so she begins a clandestine correspondence with Robbin -- the very man who killed her precious son. And that decision, once it comes to light, makes everyone around her question her resolve to forgive the Death Row inmate that everyone else wants put to death.

These are tough, tough issues that Naseem raises. Could I imagine, even for a second, forgiving anyone who did serious, intentional harm to any of my children or my wife? The concept boggles the mind, even for someone like me, a lifelong opponent of capital punishment.

The novel's premise may sound morbid but it truly makes you stop and think. Naseem creates realistic, sympathetic characters and tells the story so well, alternating between points of view and points in time, that I have no problem recommending it.

A bonus for Oregon readers: The story takes place in Blaine, a fictional town that is a stand-in for Prineville, so there are lots of references to our state, ranging from the Crooked and Metolius rivers to the Oregon State Penitentiary, even down to the flocks of geese that still gather on the grass outside the prison. And to think...when we lived in Salem, our home was a mere mile away from that very same prison on State Street in Oregon's capital city.

Photograph by Gretchen Mashkury