Things We Once Held Dear

The low, gravelly voice of Richard Ferrone lends a subtle ambiance to this inspirational novel by Ann Tatlock. The story revolves around Neil Sadler, recently widowed, who returns to his home in Mason, Ohio, after a thirty-year absence. His purpose is to restore his childhood home and turn it into a bed-and-breakfast, but he gets far more than he planned. Old memories surface, along with the renewal of old relationships, and a thirty-year-old murder is again brought to the forefront. Ferrone brings the story to another level with his outstanding ability to portray characters with rich tenderness and emotion. N.L. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

November 28, 2005
Like an artist working with small chips of colored glass, Christy Award–winning novelist Tatlock takes multiple characters and fragments of their stories and pieces them together into a tranquil mosaic of commitment, faith, love and homecoming. When artist Neil Sadler's wife dies suddenly in New York City, he is drawn back to Mason, Ohio, the hometown that he fled almost three decades before. He spends the summer helping remodel an old "Gothic Horror" farmhouse into a bed-and-breakfast, trying to reconnect with his past and his cousin Mary Beeken. After a childhood spent caring for an invalid mother, Mary is trapped in a 23-year-old marriage to a troubled, alcoholic cop and feels her life has never quite gotten started. Mary's mother's murder years earlier and questions of innocence and guilt cast shadows on the lives of several Mason families. As Neil and Mary try to make sense of what has happened to their lives, they both discover that "ou don't have to understand something completely to know it's true." Tatlock moves back and forth between different characters and earlier time periods, sometimes confusingly so. But Tatlock is one of Christian fiction's better wordsmiths, and her lovely prose reminds readers why it is a joy to savor her stories.