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Wright's third novel also is under contract with Broadman & Holman. "As far as I can tell," Wright says in her flat Midwestern tone, "this is a book about redemption, but Lord only knows what the theme is going to be when it's finished." She's keeping a closed mouth about the plot of novel number three, revealing only that it depicts, from the perspectives of four narrators, the efforts of a family to ride out an Iowa farm crisis. "This is a family that in many ways has fallen apart. They don't put themselves back together, really, but they do find a way to keep going in spite of things."

That trick—to keep going in spite of things—is a lesson Wright says she learned growing up. "As a child, I came to understand, to put it in evangelical language, that our God is a God who will take whatever's there and make something out of it. In every life, redemption is torn up through our mistakes and rebellion, but a lot of times it's just life. For me, redemption is just that. You take all the pieces and rubble. Sometimes you feel that's all that's left, and yet something new will grow up out of it. Something that is okay will grow up out of a situation that's not okay."

Wright's books are not the only novels that make clear that CBA houses are paying more attention to quality fiction. Sharon Ewell Foster, for example, burst onto the scene with her 2000 novel Passing by Samaria (Multnomah), which chronicles young Southern Alena's 1919 move to Chicago, the "city of broad shoulders." Foster follows up this spring with a novel set in present-day North Carolina; according to prerelease reviews, Ain't No River (Multnomah) is up there with Terri McMillan, if not Toni Morrison. (Foster's success indicates that not only is there interest in quality fiction, but publishers are also increasingly aware of a fiction market they once overlooked almost entirely: African-American evangelical readers.) Jamie Langston Turner, an English professor at Bob Jones University, made a splash with her novel Some Wildflower in My Heart (Bethany House), which, Fried Green Tomatoes-style, tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a severe, uncharitable cafeteria manager and an unstoppably cheery, good, selfless church organist. Lisa Samson's March 2001 novel The Church Ladies (Multnomah) gives readers a look at families and friendship in the wake of an extramarital affair and the tragic death of a college freshman.

Still, if Foster, Turner, and others have made noble and much-appreciated contributions to the maturing of Christian fiction, their novels in no way rival the subtlety, depth, and panache of Grace at Bender Springs and Velma Still Cooks in Leeway. Nor is their prose as elegant.

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April 23 2001, Vol. 45, No. 6