One Thousand Gifts

A farmer's wife in North Perth, Ontario, with seven children and a house that runs on chores, starts writing a list. Gift one is morning shadows across old floors. Gift two is jam piled high on the toast. Gift three is the cry of a blue jay. The list is meant to reach a thousand, and the subtitle states the terms without decoration: a dare to live fully right where you are.

The argument underneath the counting is one Greek word. Eucharisteo, thanksgiving, is what Voskamp builds on, and her claim about it is not a modest one. Ingratitude, non-eucharisteo, was the fall itself, humanity's discontent with everything God gives freely. That makes the list a reversal of the first sin rather than a mood exercise, performed one jar of jam at a time. It also means the list has to carry the hard things, and it does. It runs straight through the death of her sister and does not stop there.

The reservation is the prose, and it is a real one. Voskamp writes in fragments, inverts word order, and keeps the line between prose and poetry deliberately smudged, so that a plain observation arrives rearranged. Taken on its own terms the style is the argument: attention slowed down far enough to change what is seen. Taken any other way it is exhausting inside twenty pages and gets no easier. There is no middle position available on this book, and one chapter is enough to settle which side of it a reader is on.