CANDLEWOOD

In Casey’s 1970s-set novel, a young woman struggles with her faith and her heart.

Margaret “Meg” Joyce, still smarting from her last-minute breakup with her fiance, has taken a job working for the Eldercare program at St. Gabriel’s church in Shady Bluff, Minnesota. As the story opens, one of the church’s newest priests, Father Darren (“who looked like he spent more time in the gym than on his knees”) takes Meg to a back room, clearly hoping for a sexual encounter. She evades it, plaintively thinking, “God, I ask you for love and you give me a snake?” While assisting one of her Eldercare patients in getting her cat out of a tree, she’s unexpectedly helped by a gorgeous stranger: Father Andy Vogel, a charismatic and hard-working church missionary with whom Meg steadily falls in love. This, of course, prompts both Father Andy and Meg to conflict with the edicts of the Church. “If you’re waiting for the Church to bless your marriage bed with this man,” a sympathetic nun warns Meg during this crisis, when Meg herself is considering becoming a nun, “I dare say your bones will creak long before your mattress does.” “God often leads us by winding roads,” Meg is warned, and Casey charts those winding roads through violation and heartbreak with a readable style and a generous amount of empathy. The author occasionally indulges in breathless overwriting (“I breathed in all the stars in the sky”), but her skill at crafting characters is finely tuned, and even the book’s minor secondary characters feel fully realized. Meg’s struggles with the dictates of the Church will resonate with a great many of Casey’s readers; the author’s refusal to settle for easy novelistic solutions to complicated issues is refreshing.

A heartfelt and well-orchestrated story of disillusioned faith and elusive hope.