God Must Be Weeping (Book) Review

Montgomery Mason is off to war.

As a young man in the midst of World War II, Monty feels compelled to enlist in the Army and serve patriotically. All around him, thousands of others are doing the same, and still more are enlisted. America has come under attack, and there seems no choice but to fight.

For Monty, the decision was easy. Growing up as the son of a World War I veteran who valiantly served, Monty had always wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. While leaving his mother and his home is heart wrenching, he knows what he must do. But the same cannot be said for the other Misfits, a band of four unlikely friends who find kindred souls in vastly different people at basic training. Monty, a single writer from the North, meets Mo and Hunter, two single Southern boys, and Mako, a wealthy fellow Northerner, and they vow to be friends for life. In the uncertainty of combat, just how long “for life” will end up to be remains to be determined.

God Must Be Weeping is a somewhat disjointed book. It is told in a back and forth style, where Monty and a few of the others reminisce about their current situations, and the circumstances that have led them there. As a reader, you are taken back and forth between basic training, times before basic training, various times in combat, and what comes after. The problem is, the time sort of jumps all over the place, without even a date or anything to let you get your bearings. This, combined with a similar switch between characters, can make the story difficult to follow at times.

Along with that issue, God Must Be Weeping is a book that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Is it a book of wartime camaraderie? A book on how one man finds himself? A book on finding your faith in the midst of a horrendous war? Like the time switches, it foes back and forth between all three types of stories, and does none of them justice.  In particular, the faith issue bothered me, simply because it is billed as a book about a young man finding faith in the most trying of times. But it really isn’t about that.

Issues of faith and God pop up here and there, in often unlikely situations, and they just don’t make a lot of sense. As someone who has read both war novels, and faith based novels, the way the faith aspect is presented is just not well done. There isn’t a likely progression from questioning to embracing fully, and it really doesn’t make you feel as though these men found something higher to get them through their struggles. Like other portions, it seems disjointed and just not all that believable – more of an afterthought that a fully fleshed idea.

God Must Be Weeping is a book that perhaps tries to do too much. It has faith, it has flashbacks, it has the horrors of war, but none of them pull together in a truly engrossing way.