Julie by Catherine Marshall

About the book:

(from the publisher) Will the dam hold?

Julie Wallace has always wanted to write. Trying to escape the Great Depression, Julie’s father buys the Alderton Sentinel, a small-town newspaper in flood-prone Alderton, Pennsylvania, and moves his family there. As flash floods ominously increase, Julie’s investigative reporting uncovers secrets that could endanger the entire community.

Julie, the newspaper, and her family are thrown into a perilous standoff with the owners of the steel mills as they investigate the conditions of the immigrant laborers. As the Alderton Sentinel and Julie take on a more aggressive role to reform these conditions, seething tensions come to a head.

When a devastating tragedy follows a shocking revelation, Julie’s courage and strength are tested. Will truth and justice win, or will Julie lose everything she holds dear?

Genre: Fiction/Christian Fiction/Historical Fiction

If this were a movie, I’d rate it: PG

About the author:

Catherine Marshall, New York Times best-selling author of thirty books, is best known for her novel Christy. Based on the life of her mother, a teacher of mountain children in poverty-stricken Tennessee, Christy captured the hearts of millions and became a popular CBS television series. As her mother reminisced around the kitchen table at Evergreen Farm, Catherine probed for details and insights into the rugged lives of these Appalachian highlanders.A beloved inspirational writer and speaker, Catherine’s enduring career spanned four decades and six continents, and reached over 30 million readers.

My take:

So, this was interesting. I’d actually read Julie for the first time many years ago after reading Catherine Marshall’s other novel, Christy. I reread Christy for the umpteenth time last fall and loved it just as much as I did the first time. You can read my review of it here. When the same publisher released this new edition of Julie, I welcomed the chance to read it again to see if my impression of it had changed.

What I remembered of Julie was that I liked it but didn’t love it the same way I did Christy. And after reading it again, that remains my impression. Julie is a remarkable story, full of drama, intensity, and romance. Then and now, I marveled at its vivid portrayal of a difficult era and a catastrophe that remains as tragic as always. But I found that Julie lacked the finesse of Christy. After reading the notes included in the book, I’m left wondering if that’s because Catherine Marshall died before she could finish revisions. That process was presumably left for others who published her work posthumously. That’s not to say that Julie is not a solid work of fiction. It simply does not have the fine nuance that made Christy, in my opinion, one of the finest inspirational novels ever.

Still, if you’ve not read it before, Julie deserves your time. Its characters are memorable, and the details of the story’s climax as vividly horrifying as ever. There’s no denying the evergreen quality of this novel. It certainly continues to hold its own among historical fiction.

Thanks to Evergreen Farm and JustRead for providing me this book free of charge. All opinions are mine.

Buy it here. 

After words:

What books by Catherine Marshall have you read? Do you have a favorite?