Elizabeth Troylynn’s new book is titled His Mosaic Masterpiece. As the titling would imply, the book is an unapologetically Christian memoir about Ms. Troylynn’s odyssey through foster care and adoption. Troylynn is shrewd in adopting a somewhat matter-of-fact tonality. There’s never the sense of her trying to tell the reader, rather she shows them the redeeming power of His love, and the ability to persevere with God’s will through the seemingly insurmountable. Troylynn has this wonderful ability to make the images stick in your mind, not just in terms of literal imaginative and empathetic conjuring, but simultaneously in an evocative sense.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: https://elizabethtroylynn.com/
The deep sense of layering she bestows upon the narrative of His Mosaic Masterpiece is matched only by Troylynn’s decidedly liberal outlook, looking at even some of the darkest hours of life through a lens with gratitude, awareness, and a sense of three hundred-and-sixty degree perspective. “My story begins in Colorado in the 1960s,” Troylynn writes. “…When my story began, the president was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat from Texas…A lot of people who lived through 1966 remember it fondly; they forget how nervous people were. People feared nuclear war, ‘disrespectful’ youth, anti-war protests, and race riots. But I was five years old, and I didn’t know about most of that. I just wanted to feel safe and loved and live with two caring parents. Unfortunately, that was not to be.”
From this, Troylynn delves the reader instantly into sobering depictions of her father, a traumatized war veteran, and her mother, a dysfunctional, stay-at-home wife. She vividly describes a singular incident in childhood in the book’s first chapter, reducing the sense of all-encompassing objectivity into a completely subjective, first-person point of view reinforcing the profundity of Troylynn’s journey, not just narratively but personally. “Through the open front door, I saw my mother on a gurney, being loaded into an ambulance,” Troylynn writes, in appropriately sobered fashion. “Some adult—a policeman or an EMT, I was not sure—said they’d take her to the hospital at Fort Logan…On the sidewalk, one of them spotted something. It was one of my mother’s shoes. I ran over and picked it up. Crying openly, I held the shoe tightly and refused to let it go. The police officers let me have it.
My brothers and I got into the back of the police cruiser, and one of the men put our three paper grocery bags of clothes in the trunk. Then both policemen got in the front and drove us away. Little did my brothers and I know that this was the last time we’d ever be in our home. We never got to go back.”
It’s the nature of passages like the aforementioned almost threatening to overwhelm. But they only add to the central, positive poignancy and profundity making up Troylynn’s titular Mosaic Masterpiece. I love the way she is able to go from breaking your heart to lifting you up, along with a healthy dose of theological interpretation never feeling stifling – for believers, or non-believers alike.
Garth Thomas