Blog Tour: This Fine Life

This Fine Life: A Novel is the story of the daughter of a wealthy man, a daughter who doesn't feel like she belongs anywhere, who marries below her class--she elopes with the mail clerk from her father's business.  As shown on the cover, the story is set in the early 1960's, before the civil rights era, before the big rebellion of youth.  Mariette just graduated from a Catholic boarding school-- a school where she never quite felt she belonged because she wasn't Catholic, and because she never quite fit with the other girls.  Her dad wants her to go to college; her mom wants her to stay home, do volunteer work and look for an appropriate husband.  She doesn't know what she wants to do until she meets the mail clerk.

The book is Christian fiction.  The mail clerk ends up as a minister and we follow the couple to their first assignment--a church far different from those to which Mariette is accustomed.  They are in a small town and she is an  outsider again.  She also feels like an outsider with God.  God is a Sunday morning activity, not an overwhelming passion in her life, and while her husband and her best friend "get" it, she really doesn't, until the end of the book.

I  enjoyed the book and thought the writing, particularly at the beginning of the book, was very good.  I'm afraid I found the climax and resolution a little hard to believe, but Eva Marie Everson did give me my happy ending tied up in a bow.

Thanks to D.Hausler at Baker Publishing Group  for providing a complimentary review copy.