For my taste, Lisa Wingate novels are hit and miss. While I admire this Christian novelist for her ability to cross over into the mainstream market, some of her novels I’ve found too anemic – the characters familiar, the plot predictable, the premise bland. Tending Roses, her 2001 debut with New American Library, comes to mind.

But this one’s different.

In A Month of Summer, we find Rebecca Macklin, a successful California attorney, reluctantly flying to Dallas, to the home of her father and her stepmother from whom she has long been estranged. Her father now suffers from Alzheimer’s, and her stepmother, Hanna Beth, has suffered a debilitating stroke, landing her in a nursing home and rendering her incapable of caring for her husband and her mentally-challenged son. That responsibility, at least temporarily, falls to Rebecca, who has left a score of her own problems at home. Hanna Beth, for her part, is just as unwilling to receive Rebecca’s help, but circumstances compel them to rely on each other. And as they do, the ghosts of old betrayals emerge, and the two women forge a new relationship, this one based on forgiveness and truth.

In A Month of Summer, I savored Wingate’s literary prose, which was often lyrical but not overblown. I appreciated her elegant but thorough narration, using just two point-of-view characters, Rebecca and Hanna Beth. In Rebecca, especially, I found a protagonist I could relate to. Even if her problems weren’t exactly mine, her fears and worries, and (I hope) her strength of character were ones I could identify with. I also liked Wingate’s premise and her plotting, which included a compelling beginning and enough surprises at the end to make for a very satisfying read.

All of which left me wishing for more novels of this caliber from Lisa Wingate.