Book Review
Lights on the Mountain
By Cheryl Anne Tuggle
I’m going to start out my review of “Lights on the Mountain” by Cheryl Anne Tuggle with a guess. The book takes place near Ellwood City, Pa., and sounds kind of similar to a Flannery O’Connor story with its flickers of grace becoming evident through tragedy. My guess is that the author visited the Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City and attended lectures by Father Thomas Hopko, who loved to make references to Flannery O’Connor in his talks. Sometimes he used O’Connor as illustrations of the “bad news of the good news” of suffering and the grace that comes with it. Maybe the subtitle of this book could be “If Flannery O’Connor were Orthodox and lived in Pennsylvania.”
Ok, now that I’m done with my smart-alecky introduction, “Lights on the Mountain” is a lovely work of Christian literary fiction with lots of Orthodox characters. It tells the story of a number of losses endured by Pennsylvania dairy farmer and his stoic responses to the losses, which slowly change with each one. The characters are presented with lush poetic prose, a series of portraits of sadness and hope.
The lush prose had a tendency to get in the way of the plot sometimes. I know literary fiction is supposed to ramble around and not give you an R2D2 to chase across the galaxy, but I did find myself struggling to figure out what I was supposed to be paying attention to. A how’s-this-going-to-be-resolved plot seemed to take form around page 100. There were two characters who seemed to have a hidden connection and that kept me wondering if they’d find out what it was. Then they did figure it out, but they didn’t really react to it. Another place two characters seem to be headed for a fistfight, and then a while later some after-effects of the fistfight are mentioned but in a detached kind of way. A villain sneaks through the woods intending to do something bad but later you only get the vaguest sense of what actually happened. A bit more plot connection between the scenes would have really helped here.
This book also makes you work harder than most to figure out who is in the room and why. Page 123 has the main character silently walking with a lost girl and it sounds like he’s walking her home. The scene is full of gorgeous descriptions of Pennsylvania winter. In the next scene the main character is in his house with his family, and a couple of pages later it’s a bit surprising to find the lost girl at the dining room table. If you go back a couple of pages, you’ll see some hints which house they’re walking to, but you really have to search for it.
These problems aren’t that bad, though. On balance this was a nice read that I highly recommend for anyone looking the subtle appearance of hope.
Looking at the spine, I read “Toggle Lights on the Mountain” and thought this was about airplane navigation
