Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorensen

Once a singer, his voice has fallen silent. Unable to handle loud voices or noises, he’s prone to lash out at his wife Lee and their children at the slightest pretext. Dale, their father, has returned from the war deeply traumatized by combat and years as a prisoner of war.

Ten-year-old Marly and twelve-year-old Joe live middle-class lives in an apartment in Pittsburgh. Set in western Pennsylvania in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Miracles on Maple Hill returns us not to a simpler time, but to a time when simpler means for growth and healing remained accessible. In so doing, we deny them the tools for growth and for healing. Our society has simultaneously deprived children of basic frames of reference that once made secure exploration of life’s gifts possible, and thrust upon them a cacophonous array of electronic and other distractions that cripple their ability to see, let alone understand, the world around them. Nowhere is this inability to embrace life’s basic vitality more tragic than when it infects the young.

The ability to exist in the present, to observe and rejoice in one’s surroundings-as the saying goes, to live simply and to simply live-is lacking in most of us. Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia SorensenĪ measure of the brokenness of modern society is the totality with which we have forgotten the simplest and most vital of things.