I'd like to give it 5 stars but I'm not smart enough. Or maybe I should not expect to understand. Maybe the whole point is to know how much is just not understandable.

It used to be (and some places it still is) that marriages would be arranged, but there may once have been a time when those doing the arranging knew what they were doing. Now people get married and think they know what they're doing, often finding out much later that they had no idea.

So did Lila & Ames know what they were doing? I couldn't figure it out for quite a while. I didn't know what they were doing, but I also know that much knowledge is the illusion of it. We live in a time where there's so much of this knowledge and its illusions. Back then there was less of it.

The most mysterious thing is people and their relationships, so strange that people try and make themselves predictable so they don't scare themselves and each other. Lila and Ames are continually believing they don't trust each other when they probably did more than others who lived under the illusions of trust. Their connection was outside of history and the past was only stuff that could get in the way. Their souls connected while their actual selves just looked on in amazement and tried not to screw it up. What was the difference between worrying and praying again?

Having read Gilead and Home, I expected to understand better than I did. Instead my understanding of those books is called into question. Some day I'll read them again because all 3 books are the kind that aren't really about the plot at all. The plot, like the bible, perhaps, are just there to give it all some kind of order, even as the time sequences are presented out of order.

And there's a beauty in the openness of moments that can go anywhere in any way with only God to keep it from all unraveling, at least so far. And maybe faith is understanding that the "so far" will continue, or if it doesn't, then that's they way it ought to be going, even if it hurts. And each new person born into the world is just the next chapter, not in a plot driven way but all about character.