Evensong (1999) by Gail Godwin

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Evensong (1999) 

by Gail Godwin

High Balsam, North Carolina

North Carolina: 18/20

  Another book about Church people in the mountains of Western North Carolina, only this time it's the classy sort.  Evensong is a good example of what you might call domestic/low stakes fiction with just enough professional engagement (the narrator is a female pastor of an Episcopalian congregation in the North Carolina mountains) to make it interesting.  I was never really worried about anything going on in this book, but every twenty pages or so the narrator/protagonist would make some kind of wry observations about the vagaries of married/professional life that I would chuckle.  Her Wikipedia says she has three National Book Award finalist nominations (1975, 1980 and 1983) but never got a win.  Seems about right?  Church people are boring people, by in large, that is something I've learned from books in the 1,001 Novels: A Libary of America.