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As I savor Jan Karon's latest novel, Home to Holly Springs, I am reminded of my mother. As a girl, she read Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle novels with glee. When, in 1948, Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake, the final novel in the series, was published, she read it, and after turning the last page, wept, because never again would there be new stories about the doctor who could talk to animals. (Actually, two more books about the good doctor were later published; they were collections of pieces Lofting had written years before for the New York Herald Tribune.)

I felt something similar last year when I read the final installment of Karon's Mitford novels. These stories of Father Timothy Kavanaugh, an Episcopal priest in western North Carolina, and his neighbors are very dear to me. The first two Mitford novels, At Home in Mitford and A Light in the Window, were critical in my conversion to Christianity. I always relished my trips to Mitford, a town in which (admittedly fictional) people seem to live in real community with one another, and a town whose inhabitants exemplify many of the fruits and struggles of gospel-living.

I have learned a lot about how to pray and how to deal with both my passions and my enemies from Karon's novels. I always enjoyed the slightly painful year of waiting for a new Mitford novel to hit the shelves. I even bought and annually read aloud the short gift books Karon wrote about Christmas in Mitford, and I have made the delicious macaroni and cheese in Jan Karon's Mitford Cookbook and Kitchen Reader. One night last July, when I had insomnia, I really did pull out The Mitford Bedside Companion and do the crossword. I am, in short, a devotee.

So like my mother, I felt a bit bereft when I read Light from Heaven, the final novel—only to learn that Karon had agreed to write a new series for Viking, one that, though not set in Mitford, would feature Father Tim. In the first installment, Home to Holly Springs, Father Tim takes an unexpected trip to the small town in which he grew up. Holly Springs, Mississippi, turns out to be a lot like Mitford. In the Mitford novels, we followed Father Tim as he ate breakfast with his buddies Mule and J. C. at Main Street Grill. In Holly Springs, Father Tim quickly finds a group of men who meet and chew the fat at the hardware store. In Mitford, Father Tim devoted a good bit of time to caring for Miss Patty, who'd gotten a bit loopy in her old age. Here in Holly Springs, he encounters Luola Dabney Randolph Lewis, whose medicine makes her both loopy and rude.

The long-deferred trip home is, of course, a set piece in Southern fiction—think of Doug Marlette's The Bridge, Peter Taylor's A Summons to Memphis, and Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, to name just three variations on the theme. Like so many other Southern homecoming novels, Home to Holly Springs drinks deeply from the wells of forgiveness and reconciliation. Father Tim finds that he is able to appreciate the beauty of his hometown, which he had forgotten. An old flame, who has "prayed for the opportunity [to apologize] for many years," invites him for tea. Another old friend, Jessica Raney, invites him for lunch. But before the pair can meet up for a hamburger, they run into each other in (of course) the graveyard, where they reminisce and look at old photos. Father Tim finds himself tearing up daily, and he remembers things about his mother that, the reader senses, he hadn't allowed himself to think about for years.

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December 2007, Vol. 51, No. 12