(The sinner here being one whose sin is gossiped about in the community.) This is just his bent, and he has been so faithful in Ladykirk that his parishoners and the townspeople respect and love him. And yet he courageously meets with stricken congregants-the adulterer, the mother-with-a-child-out-of-wedlock, the alcoholic, the bereaved, the atheist-and brings real comfort to them and trains his congregation by example and exhortation to be kind to the sinner. He is chastised by his Elders at one point for not bringing enough fire and brimstone into the pulpit and enough discipline to wayward church members. He loves his garden and bees and the old hymns that have theological richness, he loves the Romantic poets and preaches a sermon (rather scandalously for some Scots Calvinists in his congregation) about laughter being a gift of God. I'm fortunate that my current pastor is much like David. David is my favorite character, and he is my favorite kind of pastor too. They are both wonderfully well rounded and sympathetic, flawed and yet good-hearted.
I love that David and Mary, firmly in middle age, are the clear protagonists of the story. I felt as though I had stepped into the Lyall household with all its bustling and merriment and sometimes grief and sorrow and become a member of the family. And actually I'd say we get more of them as a family unit than we get the children's individual perspectives, but I like that immensely. (I didn't fall in love at 18 and marry at 19.) The Lyalls are a happy, boisterous family. We get the most of Lucy's story in the book and her storyline was definitely the most sentimental to me, though perhaps it's just because my experience is so different from hers. He and his wife Mary are happily married with three young adult children, Faith, Jeremy, and Lucy. The cental character is David Lyall, a Presbyterian pastor in a small Pennsylvania town called Ladykirk around 1910. While I am sure readers with a grittier taste in books would find this sentimental, I found it refreshingly realistic and clear-eyed about the problems that beset humans in any time and place. I found a flimsy, ugly copy for $3 at Powells and was expecting a tale as sentimental as the awful cover.
The words "small town" and "preacher" caught my eye and there was no going back. I first saw this book on The Captive Reader's blog.
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