The Sunflower: Richard Paul Evans

The Sunflower is the story of an orphanage in Peru, called El Girasol (Spanish for The Sunflower). It is at this orphanage that a jilted woman heals from a broken heart and finds a new purpose. Richard Paul Evans is the author of several other uplifting novels, many of them with the underlying theme of God’s hand in the lives of mortal men. In The Sunflower, God’s hand is illustrated as the one most often questioned. A repeated quote in this novel is “Seek not your destiny, for it is seeking you.” Evans is emphatic that while we are planning our lives, God is conducting us in other directions. It is how Paul, a successful ER doctor with a fiancé and lucrative future ends up the director of El Girasol in Peru. It is also how Christine is dumped by her fiancé a week before the wedding and convinced by her best friend to go on a mission to Peru. It is how Christine and Paul’s life paths cross and become intertwined.

Evans is one of those rare writers who is able to evoke emotion in not only his characters, but his stories. El Girasol is a real place—an orphanage in Peru where Evans did some mission work and met the real Paul Cook who told his love story. So while the characters are real, it’s easy to give them depth and easier still to make the reader like them. It is the story of their romance that is so beautiful—how two broken hearted people can fall in love with each other in the dangerous Peruvian jungle.

The story is really a very simple one, without a lot of excess. It is simply a love story. The descriptions of Peru and the Amazonian jungle are inspirational and made me ache to travel again. El Girasol is a wonderful place where anything is possible for a group of orphans, as well as their director.