Book Review: Dana's Valley

A Fair Trade Book (buy it now!)

Title: Dana's Valley

Author: Janette Oke with Laurel Oke Logan

Date: 2001

Publisher: Bethany House

ISBN: 0-7642-2451-4

Length: 300 pages

Quote: "When Saturday rolled around and it was time for swimming, Dana was still unenthused...'Well, maybe you're beginning to come down with something.'"

Twelve-year-old Dana is beginning to come down with something, all right...not the flu, not mononucleosis, not even lupus. Dana has leukemia. The next five years of Dana's and her three siblings' lives will be consumed by Dana's struggle with cancer.

The plausible story of Dana's long illness is told by her sister Erin, fourteen months younger. Its purpose is to show readers how Christians relate to the bad things that happen to good people, how Erin prays or doesn't pray, at different stages of Dana's illness. If its effect on readers is to remind them to do something nice for a child with cancer or that child's siblings, I'm sure the Okes wouldn't mind.

Erin plays basketball, but Dana's illness causes her to miss the tournament. Their little brother Corey planted a tree where he could watch birds in their nest, and it attracted birds all right, but the family have to sell the house to someone who will destroy the tree, because Dana's endless trips to the hospital cost money. Their big brother Brett lets his bones be cracked open and marrow sucked out to transplant into Dana's bones, and it doesn't even buy Dana a week's remission. Dana's Valley is one long series of all-too-common cancer stories.

Because these stories are all too common, anyone who's spent any time around cancer patients can relate to them...and anyone who has any imagination at all is likely to cry.

We're never told whether there is any romance in Brett's life. In Dana's, there's none. In Erin's, there's an improbably sweet, totally age-appropriate "special friendship" with a minister's son who's even more of an idealistic early-teen Christian than Erin is. If there are teenagers who have that sort of romances, they ought to give thanks; I find it believable that Erin takes Graham's extraordinary niceness for granted, because teenagers do take extraordinary blessings for granted. Graham is the sort of quiet, loyal boyfriend (willing to treat Erin like a sister if she wants it that way, he says in one scene) every parent wishes for every daughter; I have to wonder whether he and Erin are in fact distant cousins, which would explain the utter wholesomeness of their relationship.

We're not told, either, which country the characters live in. Oke was born in Canada, had lived in the Upper Midwestern States, and wrote several stories that can be imagined taking place in whichever part of the Great Central Plains appeals to you.

An ideal audience for Dana's Valley would be a Sunday School class in which someone had cancer. Readers between ages nine and ninety can probably relate to Erin, who has been strategically under-characterized for maximum relatability. At 300 pages, Erin's story is on the long side. It shortens and neatens the experience of living with a cancer patient to a level readers can endure. It should suggest some things readers may want to offer to do for families in which someone has cancer...driving, errands, cleaning, doing something fun with the physically healthy children, listening patiently if family members want to vent.

Because it's true to the experience of Christian cancer families, I liked this book much better than I usually like romances. (Do I believe the romance? Why not? Some presexual adolescents do have this kind of platonic romance, although the ones I've known ended up married to other people and were likely to be distantly related by birth...) 

In less than forty years, Janette Oke wrote more than seventy Christian romances--some better than others, but all successful and liked by many readers. She wasn't young when she started publishing these books; in fact, according to Wikipedia, she's within a month of the age of Grandma Bonnie Peters. At last report she was still well and writing in the real world. This web site recommends buying her books here, now, in time for us to pay due respect to her or a charity of her choice. When you send $5 per book, $5 per package (two of her longish romances will fit into one package, with room for another really skinny book or two), plus $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen, Oke or her charity gets $1 per book during Oke's lifetime.