The village of Mitford is soothing tonic for a readership that feels starved for community and yearns for clear morals. The recently married Father Tim and his plain-folk neighbors live the best of Christianity in everyday life. Even the rampant gossip in Mitford is the good kind: folks worrying about other folks and everyone minding one another's business out of concern rather than malice. As a result, no one faces a crisis alone. Often the crises are cause for a belly laugh, such as the rectory's new computer system that seems programmed to torment. But just as often the crises have the bite of real-life problems, such as the bloody young girl in shredded clothes, whom Father Tim finds after she was beaten by her drunken father, and the soul-wrenching despair Father Tim feels when he loses a surrogate mother. The heavily quoted scripture gives a day-to-day context for biblical teachings as well as spiritual solace during the sadder days at Mitford.


From Publishers Weekly
This third in the Mitford series (At Home in Mitford?a 1996 ABBY Book of the Year finalist?and Light in the Window) is another sympathetic portrayal of small-town Southern life with just enough drama to carry the plot and gracefully developed portraits of endearing characters. Allusions to past events and cameos by peripheral characters will delight the fan but may frustrate the reader new to Karon's work. Mitford is a Southeastern mountain town where everyone turns out for benefactress Sadie Baxter's birthday, where the police chief gives copies of Southern Living to inmates?and where social trouble brews in a hillbilly enclave across the creek. Episcopal minister Timothy Kavanagh of Lord's Chapel is the pivotal character. A lifelong bachelor adjusting to marriage for the first time at 63, he has no perspective on his faith and future until he and his new wife, Cynthia, are lost?and found?in a cave on a youth-group camping trip. Most compelling in Timothy's affectionately drawn flock are the young people. Thirteen-year-old Dooley Barlowe was abandoned at the rectory and now struggles to adjust to Timothy's Pygmalion efforts; Lacey Turner, also 13, is saved from her father's abuse as much by Timothy as by social services. Like glass chips tumbling in a kaleidoscope, the people at Mitford fall neatly into place at story's end, having provided a cozy and satisfying read. Author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Fans of Karon's previous novels, At Home in Mitford and A Light in the Window, will find themselves in familiar territory. While changes come to the affable Episcopal priest Father Tim and his neighbors in the small Southern town of Mitford, the tone and style remain consistent. Karon blends humor with sorrow and grants her characters a healthy dose of heavenly grace to face life's challenges. This outing finds Father Tim adjusting to married life, dealing with a new church computer, confronting issues of domestic violence and child abuse, providing courtship advice to the local newspaper editor, and facing the prospect of retirement. Despite upheavals and strained friendships, peace and harmony are inevitably restored, and Mitford rests comfortable once again. Recommended for most fiction collections.-?Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll., N.C.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Some readers may already be familiar with Father Tim Kavanaugh, sixtyish rector of Lord's Chapel in the tiny southern town of Mitford. In this, the third Mitford novel following At Home in Mitford (1994) and A Light in the Window (1995), Father Tim is newly married to his next-door neighbor, a writer of children's books. The boy Father Tim took under his wing in a previous book is now away at a Virginia prep school, tuition paid by Miss Sadie Baxter, Mitford's oldest resident. Father Tim ministers to his parishioners, adjusts to married life, meets the other regulars at the Grill most mornings for breakfast, tries to master a new computer, and hires a chaplain for the nursing home being built just outside town. But Father Tim's greatest challenges come from the inhabitants of the hardscrabble community called the Creek, where poverty, addiction, and domestic violence are not uncommon. Gentle without being sentimental, imbued with religious faith without being preachy, this novel is one of small moments, but as Father Tim learns from his wife, some of life's greatest rewards come from the smallest pleasures. Mary Ellen Quinn


From Kirkus Reviews
The literary equivalent of comfort food in a tale of middle- aged love in Mitford, a fictional North Carolina small town: a novel that restores rather than provokes as it deftly portrays men and women caught up in the human condition. Like its popular predecessors (At Home in Mitford and A Light in the Window, not reviewed), the author's latest celebrates the lives of several Mitford citizens while offering vignettes of many more. As the story opens, 60ish Episcopalian Rector Father Tim Kavanagh has just returned from his honeymoon. A longtime bachelor, he is touchingly surprised by the joy marriage to neighbor Cynthia has brought him. Cynthia, a children's book author and illustrator, is not, however, a traditional clergyman's wife--a shocking bit of news for Tim's secretary Emma and the Episcopal Church Women. Thanks, though, to a splendid parish tea party--a tea for which Cynthia redecorates the rectory and provides delicious food--the ladies are mollified. In the year that passes, the holidays (both religious and secular) are celebrated; the community reaffirms its identity; and the deaths of the town's oldest inhabitant and of a child are balanced by the birth of twins to Tim's young housekeeper. Meanwhile, though the setting is pastoral and the people good-hearted, Mitford is as subject to change and horror as the outside world. Misogynist J.C., the editor of the local paper, amazes the townsfolk by marrying Mitford's first woman police officer; Lacey, a young girl, though badly beaten by her father, refuses to leave home because she must care for her bedridden mother; Pauline Barlowe is set on fire by the man she lives with; and Tim's faith is sorely tested and then reaffirmed. Such a small canvas framed by faith could easily be smug and anodyne, but it's not: Karon is one of those rare writers who can depict the good and the ordinary without being boring or condescending. A book to curl up with. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Jan Karon has created a town where we feel wonderfully at home. In Mitford, a village nestled in the hills of North Carolina, she shows us small-town life for what it really is: completely engrossing. And absolutely hilarious. In this irresistible third book of The Mitford Years series, Father Timothy Kavanagh is married to more than his lovable and eccentric Episcopal parishioners. He's also married to Cynthia, his vivacious and talented neighbor. Suddenly, the routine existence of a sixtysomething bachelor is out the window. How will they keep his sofa-sized dog at a safe distance from her arrogant, albeit famous, cat? Can he learn to love the old-Italian-villa look his wife is bent on giving the rectory? These concerns pale, however, beside the growing pains of Dooley Barlowe, the thrown-away boy whom the rector loves as his own son. Then, the poverty and violence of an area known as the Creek comes knocking at the rectory door. Clearly, being at home in Mitford has its challenges. And, when the rector goes on a camping trip with the church youth group, he's forced to confront the toughest challenge of all - his own fears.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This third in the Mitford series (At Home in Mitforda 1996 ABBY Book of the Year finalistand Light in the Window) is another sympathetic portrayal of small-town Southern life with just enough drama to carry the plot and gracefully developed portraits of endearing characters. Allusions to past events and cameos by peripheral characters will delight the fan but may frustrate the reader new to Karon's work. Mitford is a Southeastern mountain town where everyone turns out for benefactress Sadie Baxter's birthday, where the police chief gives copies of Southern Living to inmatesand where social trouble brews in a hillbilly enclave across the creek. Episcopal minister Timothy Kavanagh of Lord's Chapel is the pivotal character. A lifelong bachelor adjusting to marriage for the first time at 63, he has no perspective on his faith and future until he and his new wife, Cynthia, are lostand foundin a cave on a youth-group camping trip. Most compelling in Timothy's affectionately drawn flock are the young people. Thirteen-year-old Dooley Barlowe was abandoned at the rectory and now struggles to adjust to Timothy's Pygmalion efforts; Lacey Turner, also 13, is saved from her father's abuse as much by Timothy as by social services. Like glass chips tumbling in a kaleidoscope, the people at Mitford fall neatly into place at story's end, having provided a cozy and satisfying read. Author tour. (Aug.)

Library Journal

Fans of Karon's previous novels, At Home in Mitford and A Light in the Window, will find themselves in familiar territory. While changes come to the affable Episcopal priest Father Tim and his neighbors in the small Southern town of Mitford, the tone and style remain consistent. Karon blends humor with sorrow and grants her characters a healthy dose of heavenly grace to face life's challenges. This outing finds Father Tim adjusting to married life, dealing with a new church computer, confronting issues of domestic violence and child abuse, providing courtship advice to the local newspaper editor, and facing the prospect of retirement. Despite upheavals and strained friendships, peace and harmony are inevitably restored, and Mitford rests comfortable once again. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/96.]Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll., N.C.

BookList - Mary Ellen Quinn

Some readers may already be familiar with Father Tim Kavanaugh, sixtyish rector of Lord's Chapel in the tiny southern town of Mitford. In this, the third Mitford novel following "At Home in Mitford" (1994) and "A Light in the Window" (1995), Father Tim is newly married to his next-door neighbor, a writer of children's books. The boy Father Tim took under his wing in a previous book is now away at a Virginia prep school, tuition paid by Miss Sadie Baxter, Mitford's oldest resident. Father Tim ministers to his parishioners, adjusts to married life, meets the other regulars at the Grill most mornings for breakfast, tries to master a new computer, and hires a chaplain for the nursing home being built just outside town. But Father Tim's greatest challenges come from the inhabitants of the hardscrabble community called the Creek, where poverty, addiction, and domestic violence are not uncommon. Gentle without being sentimental, imbued with religious faith without being preachy, this novel is one of small moments, but as Father Tim learns from his wife, some of life's greatest rewards come from the smallest pleasures.

AudioFile - Melody Moxley