July 12 1999

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A New Song
Jan Karon
Viking
400 pp., $24.95

Readers either love or hate The Mitford Years, the series of novels that has catapulted former advertising executive Jan Karon to the New York Times bestseller list. My step-mother, my mechanic, and the members of my aunt's small group are lovers; my high school librarian, my college English prof, and a nail-biting, Gucci-toting, mochaccino-sipping woman who stood behind me in line at the bookstore last week are haters.

I fall in the love category. Ad mittedly, Karon's novels can be a tad saccharine, but they are comfort books par excellence (be sides being instrumental in my conversion).

Mitford, North Carolina—a thinly disguised Blowing Rock, Karon's adopted home—is a small mountain community that prides itself on being "the little town with the big heart" filled with an assortment of eccentric and lovable characters, who are looked after by Timothy Kavanagh, the 60-something Episcopal priest at the Lord's Chapel. Father Tim is a self-professed stick-in-the-mud, a long-time bachelor whose favorite activities include making meatloaf, reading Wordsworth, and gardening. He is also a man of deep faith, truly committed to the saving power of Christ. He does not wear religion on his sleeve nor force it upon anyone; he tends to the needs of both believers and nonbelievers. None the less, his fervent wish for his neighbors and parishoners is not that they will donate buckets of money to the church, or commit the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral to memory, but that they will come to have a personal relationship with the Lord.

As he tells his congregants in the newest Mitford book, "More than anything as your priest, I pray for each and every one of you to sense and know God's presence ...