Book Review: West From Home by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Barbara Harper

West From Home is a compilation of letters Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote home to her husband, Almanzo, while she was in San Francisco visiting her daughter and the 1915 World’s Fair, also called the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal, which opened trade with other countries. Her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, had kept the letters in a box after her mother’s death, and they were among other possessions passed along to her heir, Roger Lea McBride. When he discovered them, he decided to publish them in a book for Laura fans.

Laura spent about two months with Rose and her husband. She was 48; Rose was 29. Besides all the sights and wonder of the Exposition, Laura got a glimpse of San Francisco, Rose’s work, different ways business was done, and the ocean. I love the description of Laura and Rose taking their shoes off and running in the water.

She visited to a cannery, and “her doubts about the cleanness of canned goods from a large plant are removed” (p. 54). She was intrigued by the different nationalities of people she saw. She was enthralled by the light show in the evenings. And she took in a great deal from the city and the Exposition and tried to describe it in great detail to Almanzo.

Though there are photos included in the book of some of the sights around the time she was there, they are not hers. I don’t know if they did not have a camera, or if it was just inconvenient or expensive to shoot many photos. But Laura tried to describe with as much detail as she could what she was seeing so Almanzo can experience it as much as possible, too.

Almanzo couldn’t leave the farm, and it is clear in several of the letters that Laura feels conflicted about leaving him with all the work herself. A number of things I read last year about her showed that she was an integral part of the farm work.

Her letters are quite practical, not romantic or even affectionate much at all. That may have been due to the era, but overall she was a very practically-minded person, so that may just be how she expressed herself.

In several places it is mentioned that Rose was trying to persuade her parents to move near her, and Laura (actually called Bessie by Almanzo because he had a sister named Laura and called Mama Bess by Rose) explored the costs and details involved in moving some of their ventures to CA. But ultimately she felt, “There is no place like the country to live and I have not heard of anything so far that would lead me to give up Rocky Ridge [their home] for any other place” (p. 89).

Laura was also writing her farm-paper columns at this time, and Rose had several writing assignments, but there was talk of wanting Rose to help her block out a story. I’m assuming these were some of the first efforts towards what would eventually become the Little House stories.

One of the reasons I especially wanted to read this book was for a glimpse into Laura’s relationship with Rose. I had read mixed reports about how well they got along. There is nothing in these letters to indicate they didn’t get along, and if they didn’t, it would seem Rose wouldn’t be so keen on wanting them to move near her. There are indications that Rose was more emotional and Laura more practical and down-to-earth, so I am sure that caused some misunderstandings sometimes. Of course, these cover just a short period in their lives, so they are not the whole story.

There are some family glimpses as well, in Laura’s concern about whether they’d get back $250 they had loaned to Rose and her husband, and Rose’s note to her father with concerns that Laura was getting too fat (!!!)

All in all it was a fairly quick (171 pages, if you count some recipes at the end) and enjoyable read. It wasn’t riveting, but it was an interesting peek into Laura’s real life.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge 2013

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Barbara Harper

Welcome to this year’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge! Since February is the month of her birth and her death, it seemed a good time to read anything related to her. Any of the Little House books are fine, but if you’d like to read something other than those, I listed a few books related to Laura Ingalls Wilder here, and of course I’m sure there are several biographies and such that I don’t know about.

Let us know in the comments below what you’re planning to read pertaining to Laura this month, and at the end of the month I’ll have another post where we can share how we’ve done and what we’ve thought about what we read. You can join in at any time during the month and you don’t have to have a blog to participate. And there just may be a prize of some kind for those participating.

If you do anything else Laura-related, we’d love to hear about that, too: last year Bekah tried some prairie-type crafts, foods, and activities, and a while back Annette hosted a Little House-themed birthday party for her daughter.

For myself, I plan to read:

West From Home, Laura’s letters back to Almanzo when she went to visit her daughter and the World’s Fair in San Francisco.

Let the Hurricane Roar by Rose Wilder Lane, Laura’s daughter, about her grandparents early years on the prairie, written before the Little House books.

Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

If I have time before the end of the month, I may go on in the Little House books. But it’s a short month, so we’ll see!

I got the Little House cookbook last year, so I may try some dishes from that as well.

Happy reading!

Feel free to grab the button for the challenge to use in your post:

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Book Review: Emily of New Moon

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Barbara Harper

I read Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery for Carrie‘s Lucy Maud Montgomery Reading Challenge. and Reading to Know Book Club for the month of January.

Emily is similar to LMM’s Anne of Green Gables in many ways: both are orphans and come to live with stern older women. Both are highly imaginative and high-strung. But Emily’s world is harsher, darker, at least at first, whereas Anne’s is more charming and optimistic.

Emily’s mother had died years ago, and Emily lives alone with her beloved father, who is dying of consumption. They had had no contact with her mother’s people, the proud Murrays of New Moon, because her mother had run away and eloped with her father, to the severe disapproval of the Murrays. But “Murray pride” insures they will do their duty by Emily, and the various family members draw lots to see who will take her. The lot falls to Aunt Elisabeth (who is much harsher than Anne’s Marilla, who, though she was not warm, was not unkind.) The blow is softened for Emily a bit by the fact that her Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy (who “may not be all there, but what is there is very nice” p. 209) also live with Elisabeth, and they both love Emily, though they don’t “cross” Elisabeth.

It was astounding to me that no one understood either Emily’s grief in the loss of her father nor the jolt it would have been to leave all she had known to live with strangers. But with the resilience of childhood she soon learns the ways of the household and soon learns to love much about New Moon. Starting school is another trial by fire, but she makes dear friends with a girl named Ilse, who has been allowed to run rather wild by her inattentive father, Teddy, a quiet classmate who draws exceptionally well but whose mother is somewhat disturbed, and Perry, who has never been to school but has sailed hither and yon with his father.

Emily’s outlet is writing. She loves “the magic…made when the right words are wedded” (p. 273). She has a vivid imagination and writes fanciful stories and poems and pours out her heart about her trials and tribulations in letters to her father.

I wasn’t sure how well I really liked this book until about the last third of it, when Emily and Aunt Elisabeth have their ‘breakthrough” (and I loved that everything wasn’t all “happily ever after” that, but their different personalities and views still caused them to clash sometimes.) And then the chapter “When the Curtain Lifted” was the best in the book, I think. I also enjoyed Emily’s growth through the book, both in her personalty, as she “learns to mingle serpent’s wisdom and dove’s harmlessness in practical proportions” (p. 314), and in her writing, as she begins to realize that much of her early work is fanciful trash but is encouraged by the glimmers of talent a few others see.

This book is said to be more autobiographical than Anne, with some of the events in Emily’s life taken from LMM’s. It was interesting that a poem someone sent to encourage Emily about the Alpine path was one that also encouraged LMM: her autobiography takes its title from the same poem.

There is also a television series based on Emily, but I have not seen it.

I had hoped to read all three Emily books, but I only got through the first one, so I’ll probably save the next two for next year’s LMM challenge. The book for February’s Reading to Know Book Club. (which is all classics this year: take a peek here and see if you’d like to join in for any of them) is The Scarlet Letter, which I’ll probably listen to via audiobook.

And if anyone is looking for another challenge for February, I invite you to check out the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge which starts tomorrow!

My past readings for the LMM Reading Challenge are (all linked to my thoughts on them):

Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Avonlea
Anne of the Island
Anne of Windy Poplars
Anne’s House of Dreams
Anne of Ingleside
Rainbow Valley
Rilla of Ingleside
Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic by Irene Gammel

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

The Tenth Plague: Book Review and Author Interview

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Barbara Harper

In The Tenth Plague by Adam Blumer, Marc and Jillian Thayer have just adopted a new baby boy, and a friend has invited them to a Christian-themed resort for some rest and time together as a new family.

When they arrive, however, the retreat is in upheaval. A company planning a new Bible translation is having meetings at the resort, and a throng has arrived to protest. Someone rigged the water system to dispense what appears to be blood from the faucets. What seems an odd prank is soon discovered to be the first in a series of events based on the Biblical ten plagues of Egypt, some of them resulting in fatalities. Marc calls on a friend, a retired homicide detective, to help with the investigation as the plagues escalate.

Gillian, meanwhile, runs into someone who has hurt her deeply in the past. She thought she had put it all behind her, but the old anger and hurt rush back in like a flood, and she wrestles with the need to extend forgiveness.

The Tenth Plague is a sequel to Fatal Illusions, Adam’s first book (which I reviewed here), but you don’t have to have read the first book to understand and enjoy the second. Both books are tremendously suspenseful and feature realistic, everyday Christian people trying to discern and apply God’s will in their circumstances. I enjoyed them both very much!

Here is an interview with Adam:

What was your inspiration behind The Tenth Plague?

One day I was reading the book of Revelation and came across 22:18–19. “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book” (ESV). My mind began playing the “what if” game. Would God really bring a biblical plague on someone who tampered with His Word? I chatted with a few theologian friends, and the plot emerged from there.

How does this novel compare with your first novel, Fatal Illusions?

Though the plot, of course, is different, the two novels share a number of similarities. Both are set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where I live. I like to write about average folks like Marc and Gillian Thayer, a pastor and his wife who face unexpected, even threatening, events. Of course, there’s another really bad killer who wants to do them harm, and their retired homicide detective friend, Chuck Riley, once again comes out of retirement to help them. I also like to weave in a historical event that somehow relates to the present day. In Fatal Illusions, it was the killer’s obsession with Houdini; in The Tenth Plague, an old mine disaster plays an important role. The past always plays an important role in the present—a running theme in my novels. Overall, I like to write about redemption: how biblical truth offers the answers to the complicated issues of life. Stories, like parables, present some of the best ways to illustrate biblical truths.

What was one of the most important lessons you learned during the writing of this novel?

The power of the collaborative process. I had a fairly strong first draft, but I was stuck. A novel editor provided a creative springboard and helped me see where my true story lay. Without her help, I doubt this story would have seen the light of day.

What part of writing this novel took the most work?

This novel required a ton of research. From an old mining tragedy to autism, from adoption law to anthrax, from pheromones to the Oklahoma City bombing, the research for this one required much more than I ever expected. I’m so thankful for technology and ease of access, thanks to the Internet. Without Google and so many resources at my fingertips, I’d probably still be researching this story.

So far, what has been your favorite work experience in life?

During one summer between years in high school, I worked at a library, a book lover’s paradise. Granted, a lot of the work involved stocking shelves, but being surrounded by so many fascinating books and interesting authors was pure heaven. I was born a die-hard book lover, and I’ll probably die one too.

Consider the qualities that make you unique. How do these qualities come out in your writing?

I love suspense fiction and history, so a blending of the two always seems to come out in my writing. In high school, I won awards in calligraphy; Gillian Thayer, my female lead, is into calligraphy in a big way (it’s her job). I’ve always been intrigued with how one’s past impacts his or her present and future. This is a recurring theme in my novels because it’s part of who I am. Now that I think about it, what I write is inseparable to some degree from who I am.

Introduce your plot summary and main characters. What is your favorite part of the story?

Water turns to blood. Flies and gnats attack the innocent. Marc and Gillian Thayer’s vacation resort becomes a grisly murder scene, with a killer using the ten plagues of Egypt as his playbook for revenge.

When their friend turns up dead, Marc and Gillian put their vacation on hold, enlist the help of a retired homicide detective, and take a closer look at the bizarre plagues as they escalate in intensity. Meanwhile, a stranger is after the Thayers’ newly adopted baby. Will they uncover the truth behind the bitter agenda before the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn son?

My favorite part is when the firstborn son is revealed and the novel culminates in the tenth plague. This is the most suspenseful and action-packed part of the story, with several key characters in jeopardy. I had a blast writing it.

One of the main themes of The Tenth Plague is confronting and dealing with your past. What can readers take away from this theme, especially in a novel that deals with religion and death?

Both the villain and my heroine, Gillian Thayer, grapple with heartbreaking real-life issues from their past. But how they respond shows two very different paths. My hope is that readers will see the stark contrast in the context of biblical truth presented in the story. The bottom line is that God is enough, and He offers the solution to every problem of life. This is another repeated theme in my stories. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about my latest project.

Some content used by permission of Kirkdale Press

The Tenth Plague is available in e-book format only from Amazon and Vyrso. You can read an excerpt here.

Thanks to Adam for sending me a copy in exchange for my honest review.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Book Giveaways

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Barbara Harper

Author Adam Blumer writes edge-of-your-seat suspense infused with Biblical principles. His new book, The Tenth Plague, will be released as an e-book on January 29. I’ll have more to say about it then, but meanwhile, if you’d like to have a chance to win a copy of The Tenth Plague or a physical copy of his first book, Fatal Illusions (linked to my review), go here or click on the graphic.

Adam discusses the book here, and you can read an excerpt of The Tenth Plague here.

A few quick book reviews

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Barbara Harper

I finished a few books fairly close together so I thought I’d review them all at once.

Journey Into Christmas by Bess Streeter Aldrich was recommended on someone’s blog, but I forget whose. The book is a collection of short stories, all, of course, having something to do with Christmas, in different times and settings. Some are sweet, some are poignant, none are frothy. Probably my favorite was an excerpt from her novel A Lantern in Her Hand (which I think I’d like to read some time). In the short story from it, times have been extremely hard for folks on the frontier, with no good crops for several years in a row. Most aren’t in the mood to celebrate Christmas and have little with which to celebrate anyway. Abbie, a young wife and mother, starts out feeling the same way, despairing at first, but then decides to do what she can, even as others scoff. Her husband gets into the Christmas spirit as well, and soon they both have stayed up late or stolen moments to make little gifts for the children, and that Christmas goes down as one that remains most in their memories. Abbie’s efforts remind me of a quote I once saw from a pioneer woman that went something like, “I make my quilts well to keep my family warm; I make them beautiful to keep my heart from breaking.”

I did find, however, that it is hard for me to get into short stories. You’d think they’d be easy to pick up and put down, especially during a busy time like Christmas, but without the momentum of one chapter carrying over to the next, for me it was harder to stay with it. But overall it was a good book.

100 Pound Loser: How I Ate What I Wanted, Had Four Babies, & Still Took Control Of My Weight – And You Can Too! by Jessica Heights of Muthering Heights is an e-book available in a Kindle format or as a PDF file. I don’t remember how I became aware of this, but the title is certainly an attention grabber, especially for anyone who needs to lose weight.

What was there was good and inspirational: I just wish there was more of it. When anyone has successfully lost weight, the first thing everyone wonders is “How did you do it?!?!” The author shares some of the details, but not as much as I would have liked.

I won Courting Cate from its author, Leslie Gould, through a fun Fall Scavenger Hunt involving several Christian fiction authors. I had never read Leslie before, and though I don’t read a great deal of Amish fiction, this title intrigued me because it is based on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. That is one of his plays I have never seen or read, but I knew the basic gist of it. I was glad I didn’t know the plot details, though, because then much of the book was a surprise to me, and afterward it was fun to find out more about Shrew through Wikipedia and SparkNotes and compare.

Cate, in this story, is a sharp-tongued, short-tempered Amish young woman who works in her father’s shop, loves to read, is not handy in the kitchen, and has decided she will never marry. Her sister, Betsy, seems to attract potential suitors like flies, but not Cate: she seems to repel them. When Pete Treger comes to town, she’s strangely attracted to him, but as the sparks fly even with him, she knows they have no future. But then her father makes an edict that Betsy can’t marry until Cate does, and since Betsy wants to marry, she and her cohorts conspire to bring Pete and Cate together.

I was expecting this book to be lighthearted and comedic, and it is in some places, but I was surprised and touched at the poignancy of Cate’s feeling unloved and unlovable and her wrestling with God when she finds herself stuck in very hard circumstances. I ended up loving this book and looking forward to reading more from Leslie.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

The L. M. Montgomery Reading Challenge

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Barbara Harper

Every January Carrie‘s hosts a Lucy Maud Montgomery Reading Challenge.

Last year for the challenge I finished rereading all of the Anne books, so I’ve been looking forward to exploring new-to-me L. M. M. territory. I decided to go with the Emily books: Emily of New Moon, Emily’s Quest, and Emily’s Climb, partly because they were the next ones she published, partly because I think I have heard more about them than some of the others.

I am going to commit to reading at least the first one. I’d like to read all of them, but so far the library has on hold for me only the last two: if it can get the first one in in time for me to read all of them, I’d like to do that and complete the set this month. The Anne books went fairly quickly, so I am trusting these will, too.

If you’d like to fins out more about the challenge or see what others plan to read for it, you can check out Carrie’s post about it here.

This challenge dovetails with Carrie’s Reading to Know Book Club for the month of January, which focuses classics this year, and we are invited to read any L.M. Montgomery title of our choosing.

Announcing the Second Annual Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Barbara Harper

I had such a good time at last year’s Laura Ingall’s Wilder Reading Challenge that I wanted to do it again!

Laura was born February 7, 1867 and died February 10, 1957, so February seemed a fitting month to honor her. Many of us grew up reading the Little House books, and interest was renewed several years ago when the TV series was popular. I don’t know if there has ever been a time when there wasn’t interest in the Little House series since it first came out. They are enjoyable as children’s books, but they are enjoyable for adults as well. It’s fascinating to explore real pioneer roots and heartening to read of the family relationships and values.

For the reading challenge in February, you can read anything Laura has written or anything written about Laura. You can read alone or with your children or a friend. You can read just one book or several throughout the month — whatever works with your schedule. If you’d like to prepare some food or crafts somehow relating to Laura or her books, that would be really neat too.

On Feb 1 I’ll have a post up where you can sign in and let us know you’ll be participating and what you think you’d like to read that month. That way we can peek in on each other through the month and see how it’s going (that’s half the fun of a reading challenge). On Feb. 28, I’ll have another post where you can share with us links to your wrap-up post. Of course if you want to post through the month as you read, as well, that would be great, and I might share those from time to time. You don’t have to have a blog to participate: you can just leave your impressions in the comments if you like.

So, what do you think? Anyone interested? Make plans now to join us this February — I’m looking forward to seeing you then!

Feel free to grab the button for the challenge to use in your post:

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Book Review: Unless It Moves the Human Heart

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Barbara Harper

I’ve hadn’t read anything of Roger Rosenblatt’s before, but somehow the name sounded a little familiar when I first saw the book Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing. The title grabbed me. Anyone who has any aspirations to write has, I think, the desire to touch someone else in some way; otherwise we’d just keep private journals.

Rosenblatt has written and won awards for columns, essays, books, and novels. He styled this book as one of his writing classes. These particular students and conversations are fictitious, but I am sure they are drawn from classes he has taught over the years. Neither the book nor the classes are very systematic: he says later in the book what I had already figured out, that he will come to class with a plan but a question from a student will carry the lesson into another direction. The interchanges do seem more like conversations than lessons, but that probably keeps them more interesting. “I may permanently forget whatever it was I originally planned to say. But it is much more exciting to allow oneself to be swung into a new and foreign path, just as in writing when you find yourself in the midst of the strangest sentence, and wonder how you got there” (p. 116).

He does work various principles into the conversations, the main one being restraint (“if you have the goods, there’s no need to dress them up,” p. 88) and “the preference of the noun to the adjective and the verb to the adverb” (p. 148), but even there he admits that “if I had foisted my preference on Keats, there would have been no Keats. And ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ is a …lot more beautiful than ‘dawn'” (p. 131).

The first part of the book had me thinking, “Wow, this is neat! I’d love to attend a class like this.” The second part had me disagreeing with him in spots.

Some of the parts I especially liked:

In a section on short stories, he says, “You know the character and his or her situation from the opening. You even know what’s likely to happen. The story is about why what you know matters” (p. 12). It struck me that in a sense that’s true of even longer stories and books. Something may be completely predictable and yet still be enjoyed because of what matters in the story.

“If we look like we’re trying to change the world, the writing will sink from the weight of its own piety. But in the best of our work, the idealism is there, like trout below the surface of the water. Of course you want to try to change the world. You just don’t want to show your cards. But look at the world. Who would not want to change it? Books count. They disturb people” (p. 59).

“There’s no purpose to writing unless you believe in significant things — right over wrong, good over evil. Your writing may deal with the gray areas between the absolutes, and all the relativities that life requires. But you still need to acknowledge that the absolutes exist, and that you are on the side of the angels” (p. 60).

“Writing is the cure for the disease of living. Doing it may sometimes feel like an escape from the world, but at its best moments it is an act of rescue. Each of you has his own way of seeing into suffering and error. But you share the desire to save the world from its blights by going deeper into them until they lie exposed. You show up the imperfections of living for what they are. You hope to write them out of existence” (p. 60).

Reading good writers “is like hanging around with a superior mind. You can never equal that mind, but you strive to do your best, and not to embarrass yourself in his presence” (p. 92).

Then there were things I wasn’t sure that I agreed with, like the following:

In contrasting writers to journalists, who have to clearly communicate, the author says “There’s a mystery to the art of writing. You write, yet you don’t always understand what you’ve written. And you’re not always understood. And you’re never fully understood. And this is a good thing– dwelling in and creating mysteries” (p. 74). I can see that to some extent, but I’d think even fiction writers want readers to understand what they’re trying to convey. Some of this kind of philosophizing got a little too metaphysical for me.

Likewise he says of a memoir, “A pure memoir meanders without achieving meaning. It avoids meaning — more like fiction that is real” (p. 88). If he means there’s no symbolism, ulterior motives or infused meaning of the writer, etc., I can agree with that. Yet I wouldn’t say there is no meaning, else no one would read it. There has to be some meaning to the life written about, the things the character did and learned. Personally I’ve drawn a lot of meaning — or maybe a better word would be inspiration — from reading biographies.

“A poet tries to identify a situation or an emotion as accurately as possible…At the same time, the poet knows that perfect identification is impossible, I think that’s where imperfection is the same thing as divine” (p. 129-130). Saying that imperfection is divine seems oxymoronic to me.

This a short book at 155 pages and reads easily. I liked the banter between Rosenblatt and his students and the fact that his representative students were a variety of ages, some even older than myself, rather than just college age. It is a secular book, so there are a few words and illustrations that I would personally find offensive but understand their being in a book like this. I enjoyed the variety of other writings that he referred to, some of which I want to explore further. Overall I found some good instruction and a lot of inspiration and food for thought in this book.

(This review will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Book Review: At Home in Mitford

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Barbara Harper

I first encountered Jan Karon in the pages of Victoria magazine some years ago. Victoria chooses a “Writer-in-residence” whose work they showcase in each issue throughout the year, and Jan was featured one year. I loved her warmth and hominess and clear faith depicted — in fact, I was surprised and pleased that a secular magazine would feature a writer whose faith was integral to her stories. I believe it was there I also first heard of and then sought out Mitford.

At Home in Mitford is the story of Father Tim Cavanaugh, a nearly 60 year old single Episcopal priest ministering in a fictional small town in NC which is replete with colorful and sometimes eccentric characters. He is so busy with his parish that he hasn’t been on a vacation in years and can’t seem to get away for more than a day or two, and the strain is starting to show.

Then unexpectedly a dog “as big as a Buick” comes bounding into his life, an untamed, neglected boy comes into his care, and a new enchanting neighbor “pops through the hedge” to visit. The discovery of stolen jewels weighs heavily on him, he’s asked to bear burdens and secrets of his people, and a condition of his own begins to manifest itself.

I strongly disagree with this assessment that Karon “satirizes Father Tim and the citizens of Mitford.” I see no satire here at all but rather realism, warmth, humor, and pathos. The characters are clearly and lovingly drawn with flaws, quirks, and endearing features intertwined realistically. As I mentioned earlier, there is a warmth, a hominess, a coziness in Karon’s stories. Here is one example when Father Tim goes to the home of good friends for dinner:

In the center of the kitchen was a large pine table, bleached by age, with benches on either side. A mason jar of early wildflowers sat in the center, along with a deep-dish apple pie, fresh from the oven. A dazzling beam of light fell through the windows that looked out to the stables.

Their guest stood transfixed. “A foretaste of heaven!” he said, feeling an instant freshness of spirit.

And then follows gently irony as he muses on the fact that everything is calm and peaceful and nothing dramatic or surprising happens there just before he’s blindsided by major news (good news this time.)

I enjoyed as well the beginnings of a “older” romance later in the book. It’s nice to see love stories aren’t just for the young. 🙂

Karon also weaves quotes from various authors, poets, and preachers throughout the book. She must be widely read but does not come across as pretentious at all.

I don’t know if her books would be classified as Christian fiction: I don’t think so. But faith is integral to the story. I had not know much about Episcopalianism before reading this book and I don’t know all the fine points of their beliefs, but the gospel is quite clearly and naturally presented.

Later books were a bit too ecumenical for me, but I could read them as a continuing part of the story, acknowledging but not agreeing with some of the happenings. The one thing that particularly bugged me was that many characters have a tendency to say “Good Lord!” or “Oh Lord,” which I perceive as taking the Lord’s name in vain, using something holy and glorious as an empty epithet. It was often said that Father Tim used such phrases as a prayer, though.

I was surprised to learn recently that this book started out as a weekly newspaper column and was begun when Jan was nearly 50 (that gives me hope that there may be a story in me yet!)

When I first read the books however many years ago, I borrowed them from the library. This time I listened to the audiobook read by stage actor John McDonough. It took me a while to get into his style. He seemed a little ponderous at first, but in some parts he reminded me of a beloved pastor from my teen and college years, and once I got into the story I enjoyed his rendition very much. Mitford is not a place to rush through, but to sit down, relax, and take your time.

I thoroughly enjoyed this revisit. the only problem now is that I want to sit down and devour the rest of the books in the series. But I’ll look forward to delving into a few more of them next year.

(This review will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)