Review: The Dearly Beloved

The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a spectacular debut from Cara Wall. This was a poignant story about two couples who are on very different paths but the husbands end up serving as ministers in the same Church jointly. They each bring different strengths to the job and their wives are very different in both their backgrounds as well as their current dreams and lifestyles. Some of the most intriguing aspects of this book for me were regarding the question of degree of faith and belief within the minister and the family of a minister and how that may impact the Church community or the minister and his ability to do his job. Also, once the children played a role in family life, obviously each wife had very different perspectives of motherhood and given the time frame that this was taking place, the options for education and decisions about possible placement into an institution for the child who was diagnosed with autism added an interesting twist in the story as well as each person's relationship with the others.
Many of these issues are things that I had never considered about the ministerial life and what having a family involved in that would be like. It really is a family career, given all of the presumed responsibilities of the minister's wife within a Church. How would the faltering of faith or the lack of belief in God or Christianity affect this role? This would honestly make a terrific bookclub read.
Thank you for the early copy!

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