The Story of a Whim

I reread The Obsession of Victoria Gracen the other day, and it left me wanting a very specific Grace Livingston Hill thing: Good people doing things, and triumphing over bad people who are overtly small-minded and cruel. Victoria Gracen is firmly in that category, and so is Aunt Crete’s Emancipation, but her other books I’ve read only have it in small quantities.

Anyway, I poked around on Google Books, and chose The Story of a Whim for its title. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted–for one thing, there are no bad people–but it’s a cute religious romance and I enjoyed it.

The story begins with several college girls on a train platform waiting for a friend to join their Christmas house party. They see a pile of stuff waiting for a cargo train–a few boxes and some depressing furniture addressed to a Christie Bailey in Florida–and get interested. They see an apron in one of the boxes, and concoct a story about Christie, who they imagine to be a schoolteacher about their own age. Hazel Winship, the girls’ hostess, suggests sending some nicer things to Christie: a cover for the sofa, the Winships’ old organ, and a few things to help Christie start a Sunday School.

These gifts are bewildering to the real Christie, a young man trying to grow oranges. He’s got education, but little money and no culture, and his little shack by the beach is a mess. The nice things the girls have sent him highlight the squalor of his living space, so he starts trying to neaten things up. One of the boxes holds a painting of Jesus Christ, and it quickly becomes more of a person than an object to Christie, and inspires him to live better.

This is a romance: Christie begins corresponding with Hazel, pretending he’s the young woman she imagined him to be. She’s his religious mentor for most of the book, and the romance only comes to the forefront when they actually meet. The main theme is Christie’s growth, as a Christian and as a person. In religious fiction the two go hand in hand.

Usually I’m a little suspicious of quick conversions. I want it to be work, and I want to see the work, which is why I liked the Chautauqua Girls books so much. But there’s something nice about Christie’s gradual-but-not conversion, too. I guess it’s that he’s immediately, unconsciously adjusting to a higher standard, and only catching up with himself later. Also all his disreputable companions are really excited and encouraging about him not, like, carousing with them anymore. And Hill does a great job of making them and their humor gratingly unappealing (possibly not 100% on purpose).

Oh, also: Hill, like most white authors of her time, doesn’t know how to write black people. So, while her intentions seem relatively kind, the Sunday school scenes can be uncomfortable to read. They were by far the low point of the book for me. Everything else was nice. Not exciting, but nice. There’s an unpretentiousness about The Story of a Whim that makes it easy to take as it comes.