Rating: 
Summary: learning to write, how to use understatement
Review: If anyone wants to learn to write in the second person, wants to condense emotion into words exquisitely, needs to express grief in an exceptional way, then Stewart O'Nan should be your teacher. This is a beautiful study in understated panic and an example of careful navigation.
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Summary: Engrossing, morbid novel about love and death
Review: This engrossing tale quickly draws you into the life of a small town after the Civil War. One quickly finds oneself feeling a strong kinship with the kind, gentle narrator who guides us through his town, his family and his life. The reader is left almost breathless as one tragedy after another befalls this good man and the town in which he lives. As his world crumbles around him, we watch as this man reexamines and is tested concerning his faith, his beliefs in mankind, and his sense of responsibility to his family and his neighbors. Before you know it, the book is over. This is a very fast read, and at the end you'll find yourself wishing that you had more time with the narrator, more time to figure out what he does next and how he continues on after the events that have befallen him. Great read!
Rating:
Summary: At least eight stars!
Review: Stewart O'Nan never fails to impress me. He tackles different themes, different eras, different everything in each book. This one, slim and incisive, is a masterpiece of understatement. The tale of Jacob Hansen's life and losses soon after the Civil War, when the town of Friendship is stricken by both a diphtheria epidemic and a raging forest fire, is exquisitely simple but remarkably powerful. I haven't stopped thinking about this book since I finished reading it. I marvel at how much O'Nan manages to convey without ever being explicit. Love, tragic loss, and survival against all odds are the interwoven strands of the theme. Life lessons compressed into one short book. This is a very special novel, written by a wonderfully gifted writer.
Rating: 
Summary: alright, but definitely overrated
Review: I would consider myself a somewhat sophisticated reader, and often find that choosing a book worthy of reading (and investing my time) with the help of internet reviews and editorial reviews takes some time.However, I feel that A Prayer for the Dying is not quite the masterpiece that the customer reviews seem to indicate. O'Nan uses a unique plot and setting to make the book interesting, but if other writers wrote a book of this short length (195 SMALL Pages) or longer, they could surely do better in the area of character development, and concentrate less on body counts. The setting for the book and the story are interesting, but I feel that there was little character development, even of the main character, other than some simplistic moral arguments. Even his grief over his wife's death seemed too subdued.
Rating:
Summary: A visceral experience
Review: Although this novel is unrelentingly depressing, it remains vivid two weeks after I finished it and have moved on to other books. Why? O'Nan's use of the second person point of view is the primary reason, but his stark, descriptive prose is also memorable. Because "you" are the main character in this unusual novel, the reader finds himself or herself immediately involved in Jacob Hansen's fight against diphtheria, fire, self-doubt, and fear. Through Hansen's eyes, "you" see the disintegration of Friendship, both as the Wisconsin town he loves and as the loss of companionship and trust inherent in true friendship. Many of the events and desriptions are gut-wrenching, truly visceral, and made more so because they happen to "you." Beautiful prose makes even the more sickening scenes powerful. If the true worth of a book is the effect it has on its readers, then "A Prayer for the Dying" is indeed a worthy novel.
Rating:
Summary: Just read it.
Review: I'm not sure what to add to all the glowing reviews that have come before mine and I'm not sure what book those who panned "A Prayer For the Dying" read, but I can't believe it was the same one I did. All I can say is that this book touched and shook me. It's been a long while since I've read a book that left me with chills and tears the way this one did. The Birthday Party of novels.
Rating: 
Summary: Eerie, Chilling, Spooky
Review: The story of a dyptheria outbreak in a small Wisconsin town, post-Civil War. The witness, Jacob Hanson, tells the story in second person as he serves the dead as undertaker and the living as sheriff. The heartbreaking decisions made to stem the spread of the epidemic and save the town fall on Jacob's shoulders. Clinging to scraps of sanity, he tries to maintain clam and quarantine as a forrest fire encroaches on the town's border. Marvelous prose and the second person voice demand to be re-read: Is Jacob really sleeping with his dead wife, Marta, or just imagining her next to him? A story that left me asking, "What would I do?"
Rating:
Summary: Best novel of 1999
Review: It's interesting to note the range of reader responses to this book. To me, that points out its power to affect people in extreme ways. I rank this as the best new novel I've read in the past few years. As a writer myself, I'm jealous. As a reader, I'm overjoyed that I had the opportunity to take this dark yet insightful journey into the human soul. Count me as an O'Nan fan for life.
Rating:
Summary: Macabre & Thought Provoking
Review: This was my second novel of O'Nan's after Snow Angels. I think I was attracted to the book because a health situation in my family really made me get philosophical about issues concerned with dying. Perhaps I thought reading this book would somehow be part of a therapy for me to get a perspective on the issue. I found tremendously engaging the tensions between faith and hope on one side and the reality of illness, death and tragedy on the other. I don't know why people die. I suppose if God had intended that we live forever on this earth, we would. So the fact that everybody dies ought to be a clue that this earthly existence is secondary in the overall plan. But when humanly confronted with death, how we cling to life and to the lives of those we love! This aspect of the novel seemed so real to me. I think I agree with the reviewers who wonder why the main character didn't just get his family out of town at the first sign of trouble. I would. On the other hand, there's one sentence where he wonders if he had, whether that would have just meant death for Cousin Bette -- and that doubt made me feel the character was less stupid. The macabre aspects of the story, the swirling descriptions of death and conflagration are masterfully written, O'Nan the modern Poe. Why the book ended as it did or what we are left with after having been through this journey, I'm not sure. Maybe this is much the same way one deals with any tradegy or family illness, we just go on if we have to. In the end, this novel whisks by as a brisk read, slowed down only by the intensity of its subject. The second person description is different and inventive. Johnny Depp should star in the film. I'm glad I read it. Try it out.
Rating:
Summary: If I could give it more stars I would...
Review: Along with Tim O'Brien, Stewart O'Nan is one of the BEST fiction writers working today. They have the power to affect the reader like very few authors ever manage. In Prayer for the Dying, you are not just a passive observer, you are actually an integral part of the actions and decisions that drive Jacob. The last few pages caused me to cry out loud "Ohmigod!" A Prayer For the Dying is now and forever part of my soul, and it will live there, with O'Brien's The Things They Carried, for the rest of my life. Now, how many books can you say that about?
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