A Prayer for Orion
“A Prayer for Orion is one of the most important books of our time. With heartbreaking honesty and wide-eyed clarity, James offers us an intimate view of the opioid crisis. Her vulnerability, compassion, and sagacious insight confront our tendency to judge or distance ourselves from addicts—and instead invite us to lean in and love.”
Dorothy Littell Greco, author of Making Marriage Beautiful
It's always somebody else's kid―until it's yours. When Katherine James and her husband found out their son was using heroin, their responses ran the gamut: disbelief, anger, helplessness, guilt.
As they struggled to come to grips with their son's addiction and decide how best to help him, their home became a refuge for an unlikely assortment of their son's friends, each with their own story, drawn by the simple love and acceptance they found there―"the Lost Boys," James calls them.
In this sensitive, vulnerable memoir, award-winning novelist James turns her lush prose to a new purpose: to tell her family's story through the twists and turns of her son's addiction, overdose, and slow recovery. The result is not just a look at the phenomenon of drug abuse in suburban America, but also a meditation on the particular anguish of loving a wayward child and clinging to a desperate trust in God's providence through it all.
Praise