The Bridge at San Luis Rey

 The Bridge at San Luis Rey was written by Thornton Wilder and is on  Time Magazines 100 best novels.  This book won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel in 1928. This story is set in Peru about a fictional event that happened in July of 1714. An ancient Incan rope bridge collapses and six people on the bridge plunge into the deep river below and are killed. A local missionary, a Franciscan friar by the name of Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe as he was preparing to cross the bridge himself.  He sees this as a chance to prove Divine Providence. He embarks to learn all he can about the five people. For the next six years he interviews people about the victims so he can prove God had a plan for them. Most of the book are chapters describing Dona Maria, her companion Pepita (an orphan borrowed from the orphanage), Estaban, a sea captain named Captain Alvarez, Uncle Pio, and a seven year old boy named Dom Jaime. Some of the people in the book are based on real people. The rope bridge is based on another rope bridge at a different location. This novel has been made into four movies, a play and an opera. This was an interesting story partly because the setting is so foreign. The setting on 1714 is also foreign. This is a time when people hired others to write letters for them. Estaban had a job writing letters or advertisements for others for a time but he was also a fisherman, a laborer, a delivery person and a sailor. Captain Alvarez had just talked him into taking a trip to China on his boat and that is why they were on the bridge together. I liked this book because it gave me an escape to another continent and another century. Instead of worrying about Covid 19 I worried about the smallpox epidemic.