I  heard about this beautiful novel about family love in a BYU speech. It’s called Pillars of the House by Charlotte Yonge. If I am going to spend my time reading fiction, I want it to be entertaining as well as supportive of family love and the trials of real life. I’m just not a fantasy girl. 

This sounds like a great pick for the one novel I read this summer. I heard about it from this BYU speech featured below by Leslee Thorne Murphy. This is what Dr. Murphy said about it:

 [Pillars of the House ]narrates the adventures of a family with ­thirteen children. Their father is a poor clergy­man working as a curate to help oversee a ­parish in the Anglican Church. They are a complex and lively family whose members have their share of joy, laughter, and comfort in one another as well as their share of the ­conflicts, petty betrayals, and estrangements that any group of humans encounters when they interact on a daily basis. In other words, this family behaves as a typical family does.

That is, until their father contracts tuberculosis from a poor man he helped to nurse, suffers for years, and dies the day that his wife delivers her last two children—twins. Their mother passes away three years later, having never recovered from complications due to falling down the stairs while she was pregnant. The thirteen children are left to fend for themselves, and this is where the real plot of the novel begins.

Yonge’s novel narrates the children’s ­predicament and the means they take to ­survive. Underlying this narrative is a prolonged contemplation on what it means to live a peaceful life in the midst of nearly unimaginable adversity. 

Sounds intriguing right? Here is a link to some digital copies.