Book Review: This Fine Life

In some ways it is hard to pin down what This Fine Life by Eva Marie Everson is about, for it had many layers, and each one is rich and deep.

It’s about Mariette Putnam, who has just graduated from boarding school in 1959 and returned to her privileged home in a small Georgia town, where her parents each have different plans for her. Her mother wants her to meet and marry the right man (with the right family, right job, right bank account, right connections, etc.). Her father wants her to take advantage of the new possibilities open for women and go to college. Mariette doesn’t know what she wants…until she runs into Thayne Scott, the mail clerk at her father’s factory. Not only is Thayne not the right man her mother has planned for Mariette, but he has a shady past, which he says he has put behind him now.

Thus begins  an unlikely romance, and I love that the author did not stop at the culmination of the romance with marriage as too many novels do, but rather had the characters marry early on and then deal with genuine adjustment and communication issues and a major unforeseen change.

So on one level, the book is about the developing relationship between Mariette and Thayne. But other levels involve forgiveness, perseverance, and friendship. One of the most poignant levels involves Mariette’s feeling of being “outside looking in” in matters of faith, first at the boarding school she attended which was a different denomination than her family’s, and then as her husband and best friend seem to have something she doesn’t have and doesn’t understand in their faith.

And though I would love to give this book a 100% enthusiastic endorsement, because I loved every other part of it, I do have a quibble with that last area, and it is too important an area to overlook. I’ve mentioned this before with other Christian fictions books, but I don’t necessarily believe every one of them needs to lay out the complete plan of salvation with the Romans Road and a printed Sinner’s Prayer to repeat. How an author handles that is between him or herself and the Lord, because He knows who will be reading the book and what they need to hear and how it all fits best within the context of the story (and it does need to do that — an extended tract with a story thinly wrapped around it will satisfy no one, but most Christian fiction novels do not err in that direction.) So I don’t mind if the way of salvation is subtle or only alluded to rather than explained, but whatever there is of it in a story needs to be clear and not misleading.

In my reading of the book, it seems Mariette’s “outside looking in” feelings in regard to faith indicate that she doesn’t really know the Lord. That can certainly happen with people who have grown up in a Christian environment: I’ve known of such people who just go along because it is the lifestyle they’ve always known until at some point it dawns on them that they have never really repented of their own sins and trusted in Christ as their own Lord and Savior. I’ve heard testimonies by people who did just that. But in this book it seems the message given to Mariette is, “You are a child of God: you just need to realize it,” and she doesn’t seem to “get it” until she experiences a serious personal answer to prayer. Now, if the author meant instead that Mariette did have some kind of commitment or faith but had not fully realized its potential and wasn’t walking and living like a child of God, rather than she wasn’t yet a believer at all, then this would make sense. But it was a little confusing when the message I seemed to be picking up was that Mariette wasn’t a genuine believer, to then see her being told she was a child of God. I wrote extensively once before that not everyone is a child of God, so I’ll just refer you to that post rather then repeating it here.

Other than the confusion on that one issue, I loved this book. I love the author’s characterizations and the way I was drawn in to Mariette’s outlook and feelings. I used the word “genuine” many times already in this review, but it is perhaps the best word I can apply: every character and every situation was real, genuine, true to life, and I look forward to reading more of Eva Marie Everson’s books.

Thanks to Revell Books and the author for the complimentary copy of this book.