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Here are some great reviews by various sources. This will give you extra insight on this book.
From Library Journal
Fair or not, Enger's first novel will inevitably be compared to the work of Garrison Keillor: both men are veterans of Minnesota Public Radio, and the book very much shares the spirit of Keillor's radio work and fiction, with its quiet, observant gaze capturing the beauty of simple things, related through wise and thoughtful characters in this case, the Land family from North Dakota. Asthmatic youngster Reuben Land tells the admittedly shaggy-dog story of his older brother Davy, who shoots and kills two violent intruders as they break into the family's home; Davy is convicted but manages to flee. Both Lands and the law follow in hot pursuit, but the family seeems to have support from a higher power father Jeremiah himself has performed a miracle or two in his lifetime (walking on water, healing the afflicted with his touch, and the like). Biblical allusions abound, and fantastic things happen, such as the patriarch's four-mile tour via tornado. "Make of it what you will," says Reuben. A low-key charmer for literary collections.
- Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Dead for 10 minutes before his father orders him to breathe in the name of the living God, Reuben Land is living proof that the world is full of miracles. But it's the impassioned honesty of his quiet, measured narrative voice that gives weight and truth to the fantastic elements of this engrossing tale. From the vantage point of adulthood, Reuben tells how his father rescued his brother Davy's girlfriend from two attackers, how that led to Davy being jailed for murder and how, once Davy escapes and heads south for the Badlands of North Dakota, 12-year-old Reuben, his younger sister Swede and their janitor father light out after him. But the FBI is following Davy as well, and Reuben has a part to play in the finale of that chase, just as he had a part to play in his brother's trial. It's the kind of story that used to be material for ballads, and Enger twines in numerous references to the Old West, chiefly through the rhymed poetry Swede writes about a hero called Sunny Sundown. That the story is set in the early '60s in Minnesota gives it an archetypal feel, evoking a time when the possibility of getting lost in the country still existed. Enger has created a world of signs, where dead crows fall in a snowstorm and vagrants lie curled up in fields, in which everything is significant, everything has weight and comprehension is always fleeting. This is a stunning debut novel, one that sneaks up on you like a whisper and warms you like a quilt in a North Dakota winter, a novel about faith, miracles and family that is, ultimately, miraculous. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Book Magazine
Set in the early 1960s, Enger's debut novel is narrated by eleven-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy whose close-knit family is broken apart after the oldest son, Davy, commits a crime of passion and becomes a fugitive. Reuben, his father and younger sister become immersed in a series of mystical events as they follow Davy's trail across the northern United States. Enger's book is filled with biblical illusions and miracles crowd its pages like proverbial angels on the head of a pin; one curious scene features a pot of soup that replenishes itself in loaves-and-fishes fashion. The highlight of the book is its engaging narrator, Reuben Land: He's funny, endearing and committed to his family, no matter how wrong their actions.
-David Abrams
Atlantic Monthly Press
PEACE LIKE A RIVER, Leif Enger's drama about family tragedy and a search for all-American redemption via the highway, is a long-winded story about a young boy and the consequences of his brother's noble actions. Set in the 1960s, it evokes today's tabloid headlines about youth-associated crime but skips the inevitable parallels to today's schoolday massacres, thanks to the more innocent time period. It is an interesting story with some interesting characters but somehow it doesn't gel these elements together into a really great book.
Reuben Land loves Minnesota, where he grows up, but he loves westerns more. In fact, he loves them so much that his sister, also a fan of the genre, takes to writing one of her own. Their father, a well-meaning janitor who can't quite keep the household running, is a man who seems to be able to make miracles happen --- ever since being seemingly divinely saved from the tunnel of a tornado, he has been able to perform what some would refer to as "miraculous" actions. However, when his older son Davey shoots a household intruder, he is unable to conjure up any miracles and instead takes his clan on a race west in order to find and save Davey, who has skipped his jail time.
Naming the family "Land" makes this seem like one long Woody Guthrie song about the well-meaning folk that populate the middle of this great land of ours and also evokes the hope for land out West in that great teeming natural province that beckons Americans to a new life even today. Somehow, though, Enger's good solid prose and strong characterizations do not make up for the mundane road trip to which all other plot points aim. There is something in the search, rescue, and fun with Davey that doesn't quite make sense to me --- I kept thinking that this story, which includes lots of horses (Davey escapes from jail on a pony) and pleasantly grizzled characters on the road who would be played by Walter Brennan were he alive today, was taking place at the turn of the century or as a companion to a Willa Cather book. Aside from the mentions of things like a Mercury automobile, there are no clues that would make you think this book is taking place in the early '60s in a country where life is automated and about to go topsy-turvy with the war in Southeast Asia. It seems pointless to me to set a book in a particular era and not evoke that era in the story. Imagine if the book had been set so that, as they traveled West, they discovered a new America rising? What a long, strange and fruitful literary trip that would have been.
PEACE LIKE A RIVER is a nice read but it never quite gets to where it should be going.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
From Booklist
*Starred Review*
What readers will appreciate first in Enger's marvelous novel is the language. His limpid sentences are composed with the clarity and richness for which poets strive. It takes longer to get caught up in the story, but gradually, as the complex narrative unwinds, readers will find themselves immersed in an exceptionally heartfelt and moving tale about the resilience of family relationships, told in retrospect through the prism of memory. "We all hold history differently inside us," says narrator Reuben, who was an adolescent in Minnesota in the 1960s, when his brother, Davy, shot and killed two young men who were harassing the family. Rueben's father--in Rueben's estimation fully capable of performing miracles even though the outside world believed him to be lost in the clouds--packs Reuben and his sister up and follows the trail Davy has left in his flight from the law. Their journey comprises the action in the novel, but this is not really a book about adventures on the road. Rather, it is a story of relationships in which the exploration of character takes precedence over incident. Enger's profound understanding of human nature stands behind his compelling prose. Brad Hooper
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