How to Choose a Christian Historical Novel for Your Book Club

Every fall our book group has the same argument, and it is never really about the book. It is about whether we can finish it. Eight women, one book a month, the second Tuesday, the fellowship room at church. That is the whole machine, and it does not run on enthusiasm.

I picked about half of this group's books over the years, and before that I spent thirty-one years putting the right book into the right pair of hands in a school library. Historical fiction is the easiest kind of book to choose badly, because the setting does half the selling for you. A prairie, a war, a small town in the 1950s, and suddenly you are imagining a book that may not exist. Here is how I choose one now, and the one I would hand you first if you asked me tomorrow: Bridge to Haven, by Francine Rivers.

It does not run on enthusiasm, it runs on page counts and goodwill. Every year somebody brings a Christian historical novel with a lovely cover and a back-cover blurb that promises everything, and every year two or three of us quietly stall out around page ninety and pretend we did not. I have been that woman. So I have opinions, and I will give them to you plainly.

Step 1: Start With the Era and the Page Count, Not the Cover

The cover is a sales tool, and it is a good one. I have been fooled by a lamplit street and a woman in a hat more times than I care to admit. So I turn the cover over in my mind and go straight to two facts: when the book is set, and how long it is. Those two things decide more about whether your group finishes than any blurb ever written. A woman I know will read five hundred pages about a time she cares about. She will not read two hundred and fifty pages about a time she does not.

Ask your group the era question out loud, because people surprise you. Ours turned out to be soft on anything from the 1930s through the 1950s and cool on the Civil War, which I did not expect from a room of Kentucky women. Then ask the length question honestly, and count the people who only read on Sunday afternoons. Half of a reading month disappears into ordinary life, into doctor appointments and casseroles and grandchildren on a Saturday. If a book is long, it needs a reason to be long, and your group deserves to know that reason before it starts rather than in the middle of week three.

Bridge to Haven is set in the 1950s, in Hollywood and in a town called Haven, and it runs 480 pages. That is the longest of the five I have read for this group in recent years, and it took me about three weeks, roughly twice my usual pace. I picked it anyway, and I would pick it again, but I picked it knowing what I was asking of eight women in October. That is the difference between choosing a book and hoping about one. Rivers wrote it to stand alone, so nobody is signing up for a trilogy by accident.

Step 2: Read the Listing for What It Actually Promises

Publisher copy is written to make you buy, not to make you choose well, and those are two different jobs. Even so, the listing tells you more than the back cover does if you read it slowly. Ignore the adjectives. Look for the nouns. Who are the people, where are they, and what is the story built around. If a listing cannot tell you who the book is about and what the central trouble is, that is your answer, and the answer is no, kindly.

The listing for Bridge to Haven gives you a young woman named Abra, who becomes known as Lena Scott, and a pastor named Ezekiel Freeman, called Zeke, and his son Joshua. It gives you 1950s Hollywood and the town of Haven. That is the frame, and it is enough to know what kind of book you are holding: a long story about a woman, a town, and a calling. Notice what the listing holds back. It does not tell you how anything turns out, and I am not going to either, not in this article and not at the table.

Here is the practical test I use, and it takes two minutes. Read the listing to yourself, then say out loud who in your group it sounds like. If you can name one woman immediately, you have a candidate. If you can name three, you have a good month coming. If you cannot name anyone, put it back on the shelf and pick up something else. That test has never once failed me, and I have applied it to a great many books.

Step 3: Decide What Your Group Can Carry, Not Just What It Can Read

There is a difference between a book your group can read and a book your group can carry. We learned it the year Dottie picked Without a Trace and one of our members, who had lost a child, sat the month out. Nobody was at fault. The book was good, the woman was honest, and the timing was simply wrong. Since then I ask a quieter question before I bring any title to the table: is there somebody in this room for whom this subject lands too close this year.

For Bridge to Haven the answer was a mild yes. The Hollywood chapters deal with temptation and adult choices, and the story weighs consequences as much as anything else. That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to say so out loud when you present it, in one sentence, the way you would mention that a dish has nuts in it. Grown women can decide for themselves. They just need to know there is something to decide, and they should not have to find out on page two hundred.

The other thing a group has to carry is length, and I do not mean stamina. I mean the third week, when half the room is behind and half the room has finished and the finished half is dying to talk. A long book needs a plan for that week. Mine is simple. I say at the start that we will not discuss anything past the point we all agreed on, and we hold to it. It costs the fast readers a little patience. It buys the slow readers a month of not dreading Tuesday.

Step 4: Check the Content Before You Check the Doctrine

Church groups do this backwards. They ask whether a novel is theologically tidy and forget to ask whether it is gentle enough to hand to a granddaughter or honest enough to hold a reader who has read everything. Both questions matter, and neither one is answered by the words Christian fiction on the spine. I have read books with a scripture verse on page one and a scene on page sixty that I would not read aloud in the fellowship room.

Christian historical fiction covers an enormous range. Some of it would suit a young teen without a second thought. Some of it is honest about the world in a way you would not shelve in a church library without a small note tucked inside. Bridge to Haven sits on the honest end. I would hand it to a grown woman without blinking, and I would not hand it to a fourteen-year-old, and I said exactly that when I presented it. Nobody in that room has ever been offended by being told the truth about a book in one calm sentence.

What I will not do is tell you that reading one novel settles anything for anybody. It is a book. It is a good book, and it gave us one of our better evenings, but it is still a book. Choose it because it will hold eight women for a month, not because you are hoping it will do something to them. That is a load no paperback should have to carry, and it is usually the reason a good title gets oversold and then quietly resented.

Step 5: Know Who You Will Hand It To Before You Vote

I keep a small notebook at the side table, one page per book: when I started it, when I finished it, and who I would hand it to. That last line is the one that matters when you are standing in front of a group with a vote to call. If you cannot finish the sentence about who it suits, then you are not ready to recommend it. You are only ready to say you liked it, which is a different and much smaller thing.

For Bridge to Haven my line reads: a reader who wants a long story about grace and consequences. That is not every reader. A woman who wants a body in the first chapter and the matter wrapped up by Friday will be restless by page sixty, and there is no shame in that. Tell her so. Tell her which book to take home instead, and point her toward it with the same confidence. She will trust your next recommendation more for it, not less.

The last thing I do with anything I intend to recommend is read the first chapter on a Thursday, the way a member of the group will read it, tired, after supper, with the television on in the next room. If that chapter does not give me a reason to turn to the second one, the discussion questions printed at the back will not save it. Rivers gave me that reason on the first evening, and she kept giving it to me for three weeks.

What Else Helps

Two practical matters that have nothing to do with the book and everything to do with the month. First, buy paper. A paperback you can pass around, dog-ear and leave in a purse gets read in a way a file on a phone does not, and it gives you something real to hand the woman who says she forgot. Second, ask one person to read ahead and mark a safe stopping point. Not to lead anything. Just to know where the conversation should not wander yet, so nobody gives away what happens to Abra before the room is ready.

One more small thing we started doing and have kept. Whoever is hosting reads the first few lines of chapter one aloud before the discussion begins. Not a devotional, not a lecture, just the opening of the book in a plain voice, the way you would read to a child. It settles a room faster than any question I have ever asked, and it reminds eight women why they came out on a Tuesday night in the first place.

And keep the first ten minutes of the meeting for the weather and the coffee. I know that sounds like nothing. It is not. A group that walks in and must immediately be articulate about a 480-page novel will go quiet, and a quiet group stops meeting inside of two years. Give them ten minutes of ordinary talk first. Then ask one question, the same one every month: who is still reading, and where did you stop. That single question has saved more book groups than any study guide ever printed, and it costs you nothing but patience.

480 pages took me about three weeks, twice my usual pace, and nobody in the group gave up on it. That is the only endorsement I know how to give honestly.