Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Father Melancholy's Daughter

by Gail Godwin
Read August 2008


I kept seeing Gail Godwin's name on the Amazon "Customers who bought this also bought..." list of books when looking for religious memoirs.

This book isn't a religious memoir, but it has the same tone. Julie has been recommending this book for a while. When I saw that it was written by Gail Godwin, I decided to try it.

I loved this book! Father Melancholy is an Episcopal priest who is raising his daughter alone after his wife left town with her best friend and never came back. This is a small town book and would probably appeal to the same people who read the Mitford books, I guess. I appealed to me because of the religious angle. What a good read and very satisfying.

1 comment:

mrsgoodcook said...

I read this book thinking it would be like the Mitford series. It was not satisfying in that way. Mitford lets you escape into another world, another place - a place with humor and other people's problems, but not problems that are so big that they make the book weigh you down. Father Melancholy's Daughter is very different than Mitford. Father Melancholy is very different than Father Tim. I think this book is more about a daughter who is making her way without a mother while at the same time trying to replace that mother in her own father's life. ....don't get me wrong, there is nothing inappropriate about the story; it is just that Margaret becomes the woman of the house and it is a burden to bear when the man of the house has depressive episodes. There are many lines in the book that need to be written in my "book of lines" things that need to be saved and reread. Read this book; but don't think you are going to land in Mitford.