Mitfordian Mores

Velma Still Cooks in Leeway

By Vinita Hampton Wright

Broadman and Holman, 294 pp.

Friendship Cake

By Lynne Hinton

Harper San Francisco, 212 pp.

Suncatchers

By Jamie Langston Turner

Bethany House, 389 pp.

Home to Harmony

By Philip Gulley

Multnomah, 219 pp.

If you're a Mitford fan like me, you're dreading the day Jan Karon's seventh and purportedly last "Mitford" book rolls off the presses. I'm a sucker for these novels of quaint-Christian-life-in-a-small-town. Think Lake Wobegon, only evangelical: We have a charming, insightful pastor and eccentric, lovable villagers who collect in a coffee shop on Main Street to be neighborly and occasionally nosy. At the end of every story is an easily digestible moral. The formula has made Karon a zillionaire and a heroine among publishers of Christian fiction, who long to be taken seriously on The New York Times best-seller list.

Don't fear, Mitford fans. There's a surfeit of small-town Christian novels. And some of them are actually pretty good.

Philip Gulley's "Home to Harmony" leads the pack. Gulley, a Quaker pastor, has earned a devoted following with his Hallmark-ish collections of feel-good "Front Porch Tales." Now he turns his hand to the small-town novel. Harmony is Karon's Mitford, transplanted to the Midwest, and Sam Gardner, Harmony's favorite son, has come home to settle down. He pastors the Quaker flock in Harmony, finding life lessons in the dullest vestry meetings. Winesburg, Ohio, it's not, but you'll be relieved when you get to the end of "Home to Harmony" to find it's the first in a series.

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