A prayer of thanks for sweet, fast reads.

A Book of Uncommon Prayer is a fast and sweet read. Each section follows the format of “A prayer for…” “A prayer of gratitude for…” “A prayer of bemused appreciation for…” all for very mundane, everyday stuff. Cashiers (may their customers be pleasant and their feet not hurt), newts, summer beaches. It’s charming to the point of twee, but there are worse things to be in the world and at 192 pages (many of them half pages), it doesn’t outstay its welcome. I would absolutely love to read this same book written more toward my own demographic (moms of little kids, in the trenches). The author is a middle-aged man and a lot of it missed the mark for me just because I’m not – prayers for the dads of girls he dated in high school now that he has a teenaged daughter, prayers for defunct Catholic publications, the game of chess, the modern marvel of cell phones, and so on. Your mileage may vary. Obviously Brian Doyle can only write from his own perspective and he did a lovely job of it, but his perspective was different enough from mine that a lot of it didn’t quite land. (If someone is aware of a similar book by a 20-30something mom, please, point me in that direction! What I did particularly enjoy were the prayers of and for various servicepeople and laborers, or actually just people – a prayer for Osama bin Laden worked surprisingly well. Doyle is endearingly aware of all the little things around him, which translated to a sweet tenderness for humanity’s lesser-prayed for folks.