The Last Year of the War

This book also changed my life when I read it the summer after I graduated from a Portland Oregon bible school. It's hard to describe how much I needed this book at that time.Nelson taught me the value of emotional honesty. I don't regret going to bible school but I now admit to myself that the experience wasn't always heaven!

Reading this book was a life-changing event in my freshman year at a private Christian college. It opened my eyes to the undercurrent of the subculture I then found myself in, though perhaps not as extreme as Calvary, the small Bible college in Chicago (suspiciously resembling Moody Bible Institute) that Jo found herself in during the time of WWII.Nelson describes Jo's world: "Happiness was a kind of badge at Calvary; it was not only nice to be happy, it was right. It was a sign that things were as they should be on the inside. But while in such an atmosphere unhappiness was frequently viewed with judgment or shame, it's only fair to add the obvious: a school cannot be held accountable for the inward state of every student. Some things will happen wherever you are, and that is where Jo was, at that school, in that city."And so we enter the world Jo Fuller. Nelson paints a wonderful picture of Calvary's masked nature juxtaposed to the terrifying, offensive reality of the city around her. Her friends at school deny that reality, equating such a place with the "world" of the New Testament, just as Jo and her family desperately want to deny any thought that her brother, declared MIA, might have been killed by the war. Jo is brought face-to-face with this problematic world in the encounters with roommates, obsessive boys, hardhearted professors and administrators, drunks, even the Bible itself. This beautiful and honest novel brought me in touch with a swamp of reality that I might have ignored, while being neck-deep in myself. It opened me to questions that my own closed mind had previously shunned. If you wish to wrestle with the complexities of a rapantly common Christian culture in North America, please, for your own sake and the sake of those around you, read this book.

Having been to a Christian college myself, this book probably meant more to me than it would to some. However, that are certain struggles the main character Jo has with herself that I think anybody can probably relate to. Even for those who don't believe in a higher being-the struggles are true for anybody. What is the purpose of our life? How are we supposed to be? This is not maybe the easiest book to get through, but it is a reward at the end.

I read this book just out of bible school and really resonated with it even though the story took place a couple of generations before. I strongly recommend it for people who have been involved in or are interested in conservative Christianity. Too bad it is out of print. I've loaned out my copy and never got it back.