Lila Ames is one of those characters who breaks your heart with her pureness. An abandoned child who is taken in by a band of wanderers, she knows just enough to know how much she doesn't know. Her observations on the world are precise and honest and reveal such a simplicity of cause and effect, she culminates into a brilliant manifestation of common sense.

"It felt very good to have him walking beside her, good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you need anyway, that you had to learn how to miss and then you'd never stop missing it."

But it was Marilynne Robinson's storytelling that sent me into another place with this book. How does she seamlessly weave in and out of three time periods-- childhood, adulthood, and present day-- with no differentiation and no confusion, to tell a gutting story with so much heart? It is truly a remarkable literary feat.