A Garden to Keep

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AUG 13, 2001

Turner's fans will be pleased with this offering, another pastel-covered trip to smalltown South Carolina, to the Church of the Open Door and to the trials and tribulations of family life. The novel is narrated by Elizabeth Landis, a polite but plain substitute teacher in her late 40s. On February 18, Elizabeth's life takes two dramatic turns. With the help of Margaret Tuttle (whom readers will remember from Turner's Some Wildflower in My Heart), Elizabeth becomes a born-again Christian. A few hours later, she discovers that her husband is having an affair. Readers follow along over the next few months as Elizabeth's faith deepens and she and her husband gradually repair their marriage. The novel has many of the strengths and weaknesses of Turner's earlier books. Like Margaret in Wildflower, Elizabeth is impressively and a bit implausibly well-educated, quoting poetry at the drop of a hat and frequently drawing parallels between her own life and those of the characters in middle-brow novels of the 1990s. (Readers can assume that Garden is, in this respect, a roman clef Turner teaches creative writing and poetry at Bob Jones University.) And this book, like her others, is too long by about 100 pages. For all its flaws, Garden contributes much to the booming subgenre of Christian literary fiction: the characters are well-developed, and their struggles are real, not saccharine. This is proof that a faithful Christian witness can come packaged in a quality novel.