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Risk of Returning
This edition is out of print.
Ted Peterson, age forty, returning to Guatemala to uncover the reason for his father's disappearance, finds himself caught in a culture of violence and fear.
Ted Peterson, age forty, returning to Guatemala to uncover the reason for his father's disappearance, finds himself caught in a culture of violence and fear.
- GenresNovels
359 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 29, 2014
Just a short chapter into Rudy and Shirley Nelson's richly furnished international thriller, The Risk of Returning, Ted Peterson, who calls himself a "lost child," is on the streets of Guatemala City, having undertaken a trip "home" to the place where he was born and reared. He's gawking, a typical tourist maybe, when he spots a young kid, "walking quickly, close to the buildings, head down, shoulders heaving, as if he had been running."
A moment later the kid is gone, disappeared, simply not there. The incident, hardly remarkable, begins and ends in half a page. That kid's appearance and disappearance is a key to the wherewithal of this complicated novel, an event that seems a trifle but will, for certain, come back to haunt us. People disappear in The Risk of Returning; they're gone suddenly, almost as if they weren't there at all, and the effect is eerie.
But the Nelson's new novel is, first of all, a search for father. Teddy's parents were missionaries who sent him back to the States for boarding school once he became old enough to begin to understand what was going on around him, once his own life became threatened by forces he never understood or even recognized. He barely remembers his father, who never returned from Guatamala, died there a short time after Teddy himself was sent away.
He undertakes this age-old quest not simply because he doesn't know much about his father, but also because he's run afoul of meaning in his own life. His marriage is whimpering to a sad close, his career is in a stall, his life seems purposeless. He returns to Guatemala, hoping, most pointedly, to locate his father's grave. He has no suspicions, no designs on discovering what lies behind mysteries or what happened. He's not sleuthing, but he is looking for some kind of cure to whatever it is that ails him.
Halfway through the novel he finds his father's grave, the substantial purpose of the trip. What's left of the story opens up to much greater value, even though he wasn't looking for it. What remains of the novel is the untangling his father's life.
But there's more. The Risk of Returning is also a love story. Teddy takes a week-long language-immersion course once he arrives, where he meets his teacher, a tough, tall widow who was born in Milwaukee, but became a Guatemalan when she married a native, a good man. Catharine O'Brien, even more deeply bruised than he is, isn't on the lookout for another mate--and neither is Teddy; but the two of them find each other inescapably and intimately linked by the horrors of a civil war whose battle lines can't be traced on a map.
A secret war, a wicked war, is being waged all around them. All too frequently, men and women the government doesn't trust disappear from busy streets or are murdered in out-of-the-way rural villages. Many are tortured and then killed, sometimes in car wrecks that aren't accidents at all. Amid the bloodshed, Teddy and Catharine, almost against their will, fall in love. Returning is a love story.
But it's also an international thriller that takes surprisingly little background to enter. Not long into the novel a reader feels the maze all around, even though it's set meticulously a quarter century ago in a Central American country few of us know much about. We're there in a moment because the plot's own generosity creates a setting so fraught with danger.
Strangely enough, it's also a novel about mission work, about Christians, about work in and for the Kingdom. On the plane to Guatemala, Ted Peterson is accosted by a pushy, well-meaning American kid in a t-shirt that proclaims "Gringo for Jesus." The kid asks him where his soul is bound if the jet they're in should crash--you know, one of those kids and one of those questions. Still, that moment keys a major theme, not because Ted is determined himself to bring Guatemalan souls to Christ, but because he is himself a lost soul who needs badly to find his way in the darkness.
I like Ted Peterson because he's neither the true believer nor the the angry soul whose mother and father loved the Lord so deeply that they had nothing left to give their children. He is not a tortured MK, but he is an MK, have no doubt. He is not searching for God or looking to bury him; he simply wants to know what he missed when his father died a thousand miles away. What he discovers is father's martyred selflessness, the greatest gift he or anyone could offer those he loved and served, the Mayan people.
Really, in its own subtle way, The Risk of Returning defines mission work in a way that's a blessed antidote to the poison of The Poisonwood Bible. Like Bo Caldwell's City of Tranquil Light, it commends mission work by redefining it in its broadest, its most comprehensive and most dangerous way.
A warning: only attentive readers need apply. I'm not kidding: the Nelson's have created a page-turner in Returning, but you turn pages quickly at your peril. Read too fast and you'll miss the labyrinth they meticulously create. In addition to everything else, Returning is a murder mystery so intricately engineered it should come packaged with its own GPS.
And don't miss this either. The Risk of Returning is a political novel, not at its base because at its foundation it's so much else. But don't miss the fact that the political right and left play roles here, that Godless communism often seems a straw man and the Christian right, linked inexorably with fervent patriotism, is anything but heavenly.
Guatemala has long been a passion for Rudy and Shirley Nelson, who years ago funded and accomplished their own documentary on politics and anthropology in the region. Writers might well ask themselves an obvious question: how on earth could the two of them write a novel together--and stay married? The answer to that question may well be that they've been married for over sixty years.
What the two of them have created together is, first of all, a terrific read, but--and I say this as a believer--more importantly, a story of grace, given and received. I really loved The Risk of Returning.
A moment later the kid is gone, disappeared, simply not there. The incident, hardly remarkable, begins and ends in half a page. That kid's appearance and disappearance is a key to the wherewithal of this complicated novel, an event that seems a trifle but will, for certain, come back to haunt us. People disappear in The Risk of Returning; they're gone suddenly, almost as if they weren't there at all, and the effect is eerie.
But the Nelson's new novel is, first of all, a search for father. Teddy's parents were missionaries who sent him back to the States for boarding school once he became old enough to begin to understand what was going on around him, once his own life became threatened by forces he never understood or even recognized. He barely remembers his father, who never returned from Guatamala, died there a short time after Teddy himself was sent away.
He undertakes this age-old quest not simply because he doesn't know much about his father, but also because he's run afoul of meaning in his own life. His marriage is whimpering to a sad close, his career is in a stall, his life seems purposeless. He returns to Guatemala, hoping, most pointedly, to locate his father's grave. He has no suspicions, no designs on discovering what lies behind mysteries or what happened. He's not sleuthing, but he is looking for some kind of cure to whatever it is that ails him.
Halfway through the novel he finds his father's grave, the substantial purpose of the trip. What's left of the story opens up to much greater value, even though he wasn't looking for it. What remains of the novel is the untangling his father's life.
But there's more. The Risk of Returning is also a love story. Teddy takes a week-long language-immersion course once he arrives, where he meets his teacher, a tough, tall widow who was born in Milwaukee, but became a Guatemalan when she married a native, a good man. Catharine O'Brien, even more deeply bruised than he is, isn't on the lookout for another mate--and neither is Teddy; but the two of them find each other inescapably and intimately linked by the horrors of a civil war whose battle lines can't be traced on a map.
A secret war, a wicked war, is being waged all around them. All too frequently, men and women the government doesn't trust disappear from busy streets or are murdered in out-of-the-way rural villages. Many are tortured and then killed, sometimes in car wrecks that aren't accidents at all. Amid the bloodshed, Teddy and Catharine, almost against their will, fall in love. Returning is a love story.
But it's also an international thriller that takes surprisingly little background to enter. Not long into the novel a reader feels the maze all around, even though it's set meticulously a quarter century ago in a Central American country few of us know much about. We're there in a moment because the plot's own generosity creates a setting so fraught with danger.
Strangely enough, it's also a novel about mission work, about Christians, about work in and for the Kingdom. On the plane to Guatemala, Ted Peterson is accosted by a pushy, well-meaning American kid in a t-shirt that proclaims "Gringo for Jesus." The kid asks him where his soul is bound if the jet they're in should crash--you know, one of those kids and one of those questions. Still, that moment keys a major theme, not because Ted is determined himself to bring Guatemalan souls to Christ, but because he is himself a lost soul who needs badly to find his way in the darkness.
I like Ted Peterson because he's neither the true believer nor the the angry soul whose mother and father loved the Lord so deeply that they had nothing left to give their children. He is not a tortured MK, but he is an MK, have no doubt. He is not searching for God or looking to bury him; he simply wants to know what he missed when his father died a thousand miles away. What he discovers is father's martyred selflessness, the greatest gift he or anyone could offer those he loved and served, the Mayan people.
Really, in its own subtle way, The Risk of Returning defines mission work in a way that's a blessed antidote to the poison of The Poisonwood Bible. Like Bo Caldwell's City of Tranquil Light, it commends mission work by redefining it in its broadest, its most comprehensive and most dangerous way.
A warning: only attentive readers need apply. I'm not kidding: the Nelson's have created a page-turner in Returning, but you turn pages quickly at your peril. Read too fast and you'll miss the labyrinth they meticulously create. In addition to everything else, Returning is a murder mystery so intricately engineered it should come packaged with its own GPS.
And don't miss this either. The Risk of Returning is a political novel, not at its base because at its foundation it's so much else. But don't miss the fact that the political right and left play roles here, that Godless communism often seems a straw man and the Christian right, linked inexorably with fervent patriotism, is anything but heavenly.
Guatemala has long been a passion for Rudy and Shirley Nelson, who years ago funded and accomplished their own documentary on politics and anthropology in the region. Writers might well ask themselves an obvious question: how on earth could the two of them write a novel together--and stay married? The answer to that question may well be that they've been married for over sixty years.
What the two of them have created together is, first of all, a terrific read, but--and I say this as a believer--more importantly, a story of grace, given and received. I really loved The Risk of Returning.
September 3, 2015
I am not going to write a review as such. Read James Schaap's review below. This book deserves to be reprinted and more widely read.
I brought it along as a vacation read. It was not "beach reading," but it read quickly and I was as eager to know how it would end as I am with the other books I read on vacation (Robert Parker's Spenser series, etc.!)
It is good when a book makes me want to know more about a place and a time and this one did. I have read a bit already about Guatamala and the CIA involvement in its violent history. I plan to read an Americas Watch Report Closing the Space: Human Rights in Guatemala which the Nelsons used as a "fact check" for the month of their story.
I brought it along as a vacation read. It was not "beach reading," but it read quickly and I was as eager to know how it would end as I am with the other books I read on vacation (Robert Parker's Spenser series, etc.!)
It is good when a book makes me want to know more about a place and a time and this one did. I have read a bit already about Guatamala and the CIA involvement in its violent history. I plan to read an Americas Watch Report Closing the Space: Human Rights in Guatemala which the Nelsons used as a "fact check" for the month of their story.
September 4, 2017
I was surprised to like this book as much as I did. The protagonist was so lifeless & unappealing early on. I'm a third-culture kid myself but did not identify with his befuddled reactions & apparent lack of initiative. Felt like a mechanical textbook portrayal of the indecisive TCK. But the story won me, & Ted does come through. I appreciate the authors' research into what actually happened in Guatemala (as opposed to how evangelical missionaries perceived it--generally problematic in Latin America). Well done!
May 19, 2016
I have just finished reading this stunning novel by Rudy and Shirley Nelson and can't say enough about how wonderful it is. I began it somewhat reluctantly, at the urging of a friend, for despite my strong sympathies, I was not eager to enter the tormented world of Guatemala in the 1980s.
But I need not have hesitated. The Risk of Returning quickly won me over through its splendid writing, its winning narrator and protagonist, its many other fascinating and beautifully drawn characters and convincing dialogue, and its deft balance between lighter moments and more painful ones. Yes, one learns of the enormities of what was happening to the native peoples of Guatemala under the CIA-propped dictatorship. But one also gets to know those people within the world of their village lives and rituals and the courage of their resistance. The characters Luis and Carmen are particularly genuine and moving, and the life of the community activist center that they are part of is so vividly drawn that I feel as if I've been a part of it, right down to walking the resident dog Molly in the midst of other more serious actions.
Ted Peterson, an American who was born in Guatemala, the son of missionaries, has taken the “risk of returning" to the land he last saw as a small boy, because he hopes to solve some lingering mysteries about his father's last year there before his death. The warmth of his reunion with childhood friend Luis and the people of an Indian village where his parents taught is deeply affecting, as is the development of Ted’s relationship with Catherine, the remarkable woman who is his Spansh tutor during the early weeks of his time in Guatemala. One thing I love in this novel, aside from the beautiful descriptions of people, settings and action, is the very natural and lively dialogue, the touches of lightness; Luis’s sense of humor even after torture, for instance, rings true and conveys a resilience that I found very meaningful.
Another, seemingly minor, feature that I love in this novel is the wonderful sustaining metaphor of Ted's practice of overcoming insomnia by reciting to himself baseball statistics in alphabetical order until he falls asleep. That simple device comforts the reader as well as Ted, suggesting that somehow decency, hopefulness and human affections will prevail over the darkness. Shirley and Rudy Nelson's novel informs the reader with great depth and understanding of the horrors of past U.S. complicity in Central American violence; but it does so with such warmth and loving kindness, such deep affection for its characters, and such beautiful prose, that reading it is actually a joy, a powerful aesthetic as well as emotional experience. It amazes me that this book was not published by one of the major publishers and distributed widely. But writing of such high accomplishment and power cannot stay hidden, and I am confident it will find the wide readership it deserves.
But I need not have hesitated. The Risk of Returning quickly won me over through its splendid writing, its winning narrator and protagonist, its many other fascinating and beautifully drawn characters and convincing dialogue, and its deft balance between lighter moments and more painful ones. Yes, one learns of the enormities of what was happening to the native peoples of Guatemala under the CIA-propped dictatorship. But one also gets to know those people within the world of their village lives and rituals and the courage of their resistance. The characters Luis and Carmen are particularly genuine and moving, and the life of the community activist center that they are part of is so vividly drawn that I feel as if I've been a part of it, right down to walking the resident dog Molly in the midst of other more serious actions.
Ted Peterson, an American who was born in Guatemala, the son of missionaries, has taken the “risk of returning" to the land he last saw as a small boy, because he hopes to solve some lingering mysteries about his father's last year there before his death. The warmth of his reunion with childhood friend Luis and the people of an Indian village where his parents taught is deeply affecting, as is the development of Ted’s relationship with Catherine, the remarkable woman who is his Spansh tutor during the early weeks of his time in Guatemala. One thing I love in this novel, aside from the beautiful descriptions of people, settings and action, is the very natural and lively dialogue, the touches of lightness; Luis’s sense of humor even after torture, for instance, rings true and conveys a resilience that I found very meaningful.
Another, seemingly minor, feature that I love in this novel is the wonderful sustaining metaphor of Ted's practice of overcoming insomnia by reciting to himself baseball statistics in alphabetical order until he falls asleep. That simple device comforts the reader as well as Ted, suggesting that somehow decency, hopefulness and human affections will prevail over the darkness. Shirley and Rudy Nelson's novel informs the reader with great depth and understanding of the horrors of past U.S. complicity in Central American violence; but it does so with such warmth and loving kindness, such deep affection for its characters, and such beautiful prose, that reading it is actually a joy, a powerful aesthetic as well as emotional experience. It amazes me that this book was not published by one of the major publishers and distributed widely. But writing of such high accomplishment and power cannot stay hidden, and I am confident it will find the wide readership it deserves.
February 25, 2014
The Nelsons have written a courageous novel considering the subject matter, but also considering how they refused to throw a sop to the shallow current assumptions of agents and editors (and hence many readers) about what a novel is. The narrative and dramatic tensions are developed at a leisurely but purposeful pace. But the reader is rewarded with a consuming story that resonates in a number of directions, not least of which is the story of America’s callous and ignorant (and greedy) involvement where it should never be in support of fascist governments around the world for mythically skewed reasons. (As if everybody forgot what we were fighting against in World War II). In short, the implications and themes are large, even though the story is focused on particular human beings and places.
The authors also didn’t create a protagonist that readers would “love from the first page,” but rather a sort of passive-aggressive flawed hero who spends an almost Jamesian amount of time trying to stay aloof from and uninvolved with the people and tragedy around him, as if unable to move beyond his own needs and apparently vague curiosities. Yet, as with the narrative, the reader is ultimately rewarded for his or her patience by connecting with the protagonist Ted, who along with Luis and Catherine, comes to life on the page.
This is a fine, well-crafted novel; it is engaging and original. And it doesn’t insult readers’ intelligence or attention span as so many current trade novels do. I highly recommend it as a good and serious read.
The authors also didn’t create a protagonist that readers would “love from the first page,” but rather a sort of passive-aggressive flawed hero who spends an almost Jamesian amount of time trying to stay aloof from and uninvolved with the people and tragedy around him, as if unable to move beyond his own needs and apparently vague curiosities. Yet, as with the narrative, the reader is ultimately rewarded for his or her patience by connecting with the protagonist Ted, who along with Luis and Catherine, comes to life on the page.
This is a fine, well-crafted novel; it is engaging and original. And it doesn’t insult readers’ intelligence or attention span as so many current trade novels do. I highly recommend it as a good and serious read.
November 28, 2015
The first chapter lured me in with the beauty of the prose, and a character I wanted to know better. By the third or fourth chapter, I was captured by a compelling story with something meaningful and important at stake, and a place and person I was no longer merely curious about, but one I cared about. Before long, I could not set the book down; I finished the book in a marathon five-hour reading session.
Set in Guatamala in the 1980s around the time of the Iran-Contra hearings in the U.S., the story follows protagonist Ted Peterson who, in the midst of the unwanted unraveling of his life in Boson, and seeking to unravel his own personal family mystery involving his father, ends up involved in several more mysteries and tragedies and beauties of a country in turmoil. Central to the politics of the country are the attitudes about, treatment of, and also the life and attitudes of, Guatamala's indigenous (pre-Spanish) peoples. But while that informs the story, it does not bog it down. It is also a compelling story about personal drama, love, sacrifice, fear, and all of the decisions and emotions that make us who we are.
Set in Guatamala in the 1980s around the time of the Iran-Contra hearings in the U.S., the story follows protagonist Ted Peterson who, in the midst of the unwanted unraveling of his life in Boson, and seeking to unravel his own personal family mystery involving his father, ends up involved in several more mysteries and tragedies and beauties of a country in turmoil. Central to the politics of the country are the attitudes about, treatment of, and also the life and attitudes of, Guatamala's indigenous (pre-Spanish) peoples. But while that informs the story, it does not bog it down. It is also a compelling story about personal drama, love, sacrifice, fear, and all of the decisions and emotions that make us who we are.
January 30, 2015
I read this novel in advance of a trip to Guatemala this summer. It was an easy way to get a feel for life in Guatemala in recent history.
I could not put this book down. I would call it a mystery because the main character's search for information about his father evolved as he learned more and I kept trying to figure things out. Figure out both what the situation was in the time of the main character as well as the situation years earlier when his father was in Guatemala. There was a new twist to the story every chapter and I was drawn along trying to figure things out. Even the last paragraph had a twist. I would like to read it again to look for clues in advance.
I could not put this book down. I would call it a mystery because the main character's search for information about his father evolved as he learned more and I kept trying to figure things out. Figure out both what the situation was in the time of the main character as well as the situation years earlier when his father was in Guatemala. There was a new twist to the story every chapter and I was drawn along trying to figure things out. Even the last paragraph had a twist. I would like to read it again to look for clues in advance.
September 3, 2014
Novel about the son of missionary parents who is returns to Guatemala to solve the mystery he feels that surrounds his father's death.
Intriguing story line and also takes you into the political upheaval that is the history of the country and the US's part in it.
Intriguing story line and also takes you into the political upheaval that is the history of the country and the US's part in it.
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