I almost skipped this one. I'll be honest - I'd mentally filed Lynn Austin under "Christian fiction my aunt recommends at Thanksgiving" and never looked deeper. Twenty years of teaching literature gives you these awful blind spots, these categories you build in your head that are really just intellectual laziness dressed up as taste. Denise handed me her earbuds during a Saturday morning lakefront walk and said, "Just try it." Fourteen hours later, I'm eating crow.
So let me tell you what actually happens in Waves of Mercy, because it's smarter than I expected.
Two Women, Two Centuries, One Lake That Remembers Everything
The structure is dual timeline, dual narrator - Geesje de Jonge looking back fifty years to her immigration from the Netherlands to raw Michigan wilderness, and Anna Nicholson, a wealthy young woman in 1897 unraveling at the seams after a broken engagement at the Hotel Ottawa Resort on Lake Michigan. Austin uses the memoir-within-a-novel framework, where Geesje has been asked to write her memories for the town's fiftieth anniversary, and that device does something I didn't anticipate: it lets an old woman be unreliable. Not dishonest. Unreliable in the way memory actually works - where you bury the things that hurt most and convince yourself the burial was forgetting.
Anna's story runs parallel, and what begins as fairly standard historical romance setup - rich girl, broken heart, handsome seminary student working at the resort - gains real weight when a violent steamship storm triggers childhood nightmares she can't explain. Austin is patient with this. She doesn't rush to the revelation. She lets Anna sit in confusion, lets her ask questions about identity and faith that don't get tidy answers for hours. My students would hate this. I love it.
The convergence of the two timelines - and I won't spoil it - hits harder because Austin has been quietly laying groundwork since the first chapter. I caught one thread around hour six and missed another entirely until the reveal. That's good plotting. Not flashy, not gimmicky. Just disciplined.
Margaret Strom and Rachel Dulude Understand That Pause Is Punctuation
Here's where the audiobook earns its format. Strom handles Geesje's sections with this measured, slightly worn quality - not frail, but weathered. There's a difference. She sounds like a woman who has carried heavy things a long distance and set them down but still feels the weight in her shoulders. Dulude takes Anna's chapters with more restlessness, a lighter register that gradually deepens as Anna starts questioning everything she thought she knew. The two-narrator split eliminates the confusion problem that some listeners have complained about with the dual timelines - you know immediately whose story you're in just from the voice.
I will say this: neither narrator is doing pyrotechnics. If you want dramatic character voices, theatrical range, six different accents - that's not what's happening here. What they're doing is more like chamber music. Controlled, intimate, emotionally precise. Strom's reading of Geesje's memories of her first love - the way her voice tightens almost imperceptibly - that's the kind of performance you miss at 1.5x speed. The prose deserves to be savored.
(I listened to most of this at 1.0x while grading a truly horrifying stack of sophomore essays on The Great Gatsby. The contrast between Austin's careful sentences and seventeen-year-olds writing "Gatsby was obsessed and that's relatable" was... a lot.)
What Austin Is Really Saying Under the Faith
Let's talk about the elephant in the room. This is Christian fiction. The characters pray, they struggle with God's will, a seminary student serves as a kind of theological sounding board. If that's a dealbreaker for you, you know where the door is. But if you loved Marilynne Robinson's Gilead - and I know that's a high comparison, and Austin isn't operating at Robinson's prose level, I'm not claiming that - but if you responded to the way Robinson treats faith as lived experience rather than doctrine, there's a version of that here. Austin is less interested in preaching than in showing what faith looks like when it's tested by loss, displacement, and the slow erosion of certainty that comes with aging.
Geesje's immigration story is genuinely harrowing in places. The Michigan wilderness in the 1840s was not quaint. People died of disease, of cold, of despair. Austin doesn't sensationalize it, but she doesn't soften it either. The closest I've come to that same unflinching treatment of religious community under historical pressure is actually in Antiquities of the Jews, Volume 3 - different century, different faith, same refusal to sand down the difficult edges. And the Dutch Reformed community she depicts - rigid, devout, suspicious of outsiders - feels historically grounded rather than idealized.
The weakness? Anna's romance arc is the most predictable thread. You can see where it's heading from about hour three. And some of the theological conversations between Anna and the seminary student feel a touch expository - less like two people talking and more like the author making sure you understand the theme. It's a minor thing, but in a book this patient everywhere else, those moments stick out.
Who Gets the Assignment (And Who Gets a Pass)
This is for readers who want historical fiction with emotional weight and don't mind faith woven through the fabric of the story. If you loved The Signature of All Things for its immigrant resilience, or if Austin's name already means something to you, this is worth fourteen hours of your time. If you need fast pacing or you're allergic to any spiritual content, look elsewhere. But don't make my mistake - don't dismiss it before you listen. I came in skeptical and left genuinely moved. Denise hasn't let me forget she was right.
