Review of Gerald Musyoki Paul’s novel, The Attitude of Gratitude

📅 Published: August 21, 2025

📰 Source: thestandard

Curated by AllZimNews.com

The novel does not offer easy resolutions; instead, it crafts a morally textured narrative that challenges the reader to confront the contradictions of faith, love, and leadership, while holding space for grace, however bruised or imperfect.

From grit to grace: Stance’s journey through suffering and redemption What becomes of a child when the world forgets him?

When no one listens to his prayers, when no hand reaches to hold his trembling fingers?

What happens to an orphan when society sees only a burden, not a soul?

Gerald Musyoki Paul confronts these unsettling questions from the very first page of The Attitude of Gratitude, introducing us to Stance, a young orphan kneeling beneath a cold canopy of trees, barefoot and alone, each thorn that pierces his feet a cruel punctuation in the long, agonising sentence of his suffering.

The author wastes no time immersing the reader into Stance’s emotional and physical wilderness of abandonment, deprivation, and yearning.

Through narrative prose, the author captures the spiritual silence that swells when love is absent and survival is the only prayer.

However, within this bleakness pulses a raw resilience, echoing Ken Saro-Wiwa’s contention, “The hardship of living under conditions of privation breeds its form of resilience. ” Stance’s journey is not just a flight from abuse; it is a passage through despair toward meaning.

His escape, symbolically titled An Escape from Egypt, draws on the biblical exodus, transforming a boy’s struggle into an act of sacred reclamation.

When he exclaims, “It is finally done.

No restriction today,” it is more than liberation from cruelty; it is resurrection, a moment where self-worth is retrieved from the ashes of pain.

The narrative insists that deliverance is not confined to miracles; it can emerge from the wounded defiance of a forgotten child.