Jan Karon. These High, Green Hills (1996)

     Jan Karon. These High, Green Hills (1996) Tim and Cynthia settle into married life. The plot meanders, as a good soap should. Tim and Cynthia are trapped in a cave, which leads Tim to a personal epiphany. Sadie Baxter dies soon after a birthday celebration in her honour. Dooley comes home apparently estranged from Tim and Cynthia, but that’s OK later. Pauline Barlowe, Dooley’s mother, is burned by her partner, and barely survives, but she and Dooley connect again. Lacey Turner enters Tim and Cynthia’s lives. J. C Hogan courts and wins the police woman. And so on.
     Karon avoids the dark side. Her evil-doers are all disreputable people who can’t cope with life; they drink and worse merely because they lack self-control. In other words, they aren’t good, middle-class citizens. If only they would pull up their socks and take responsibility for their lives, they wouldn’t do such awful things. In the previous book, there was a truly evil person, Edith Mallory, who wanted Tim for herself, and almost got him, because he’s too nice to stand up to her until it’s almost too late. And then he does it behalf of someone else, not himself.
     But in this book, all the respectable people are good people. They may be annoying and irritating, but they aren’t bad. Since these books are heavy on religion and its beneficial effects on people, this avoidance of true evil is a failing. It may be that Karon is accommodating the tastes of her readers, for religion is more evangelical and less Episcopalian in this book than in the first one. I think the books would be stronger if they were darker. As it is, the religion is more set-piecy than ever, and the prayers even more of the grant-me-a-special-favour kind than before. The only exception to this is the incident in the cave, in which Tim undergoes a spiritual crisis that resolves his conflicted feelings about his father, and relieves him of his burden of the fear of not getting it right. Here, his prayer is a true communing with God, an opening of the self to possibility, and not a form of magic. ** (2005)