The Wooden Ox

Keri Anderson is a typical thirteen- year- old . . . kind of. She's got an adorable yet highly annoying little brother, unending peer pressure, and moments of such clutziness that she really would like to crawl under a rock. But that's where the normalness ends. She and her family live in Mozambique, Africa, right in the middle of a major civil war. Though the war forces them to move to a safer location, it still doesn't seem truly real—until they are caught in the middle of enemy territory, at night, with no escape.Crushed by the disappearance of her African "grandfather" (Vovo), Keri struggles with the intense pain of missing him and with the agonizing thought that God could have saved Vovo Pastor if He had wanted to. Each time she looks at a small hand-carved wooden ox Vovo made, Keri's crisis of faith becomes more intense.Even God seems powerless or unwilling to stop the violence that threatens her family and friends. Is faith worth holding onto when God doesn't seem to care?