Pastors’ Wives
May 10th, 2013. Filed under: This & That.
Lisa Takeuchi Cullen’s debut novel Pastors’ Wives follows three women whose lives converge and intertwine at a Southern evangelical megachurch. Ruthie follows her Wall Street husband from New York to Magnolia, a fictional suburb of Atlanta, when he hears a calling to serve at a megachurch called Greenleaf. Reeling from the death of her mother, Ruthie suffers a crisis of faith—in God, in her marriage, and in herself. Candace is Greenleaf’s “First Lady,” a force of nature who’ll stop at nothing to protect her church and her superstar husband. Ginger, married to Candace’s son, struggles to play dutiful wife and mother while burying her calamitous past. All their roads collide in one chaotic event that exposes their true selves. Inspired by Cullen’s reporting as a staff writer for Time magazine, Pastors’ Wives is a dramatic portrayal of the private lives of pastors’ wives, caught between the demands of faith, marriage, duty, and love.
ISLAND BREEZES
This is an interesting novel of what the lives of preachers’ wives can be like. It focuses on relationships both without the church and without.
The Greenleaf church seems to be more of a business than a worship center. It’s also focused on the idea that any path to God is okay, so this church appears to have lost it’s way spiritually as well.
The three wives are interrelated both by virtue of church family and actual physical family.
All three have marriages that appear to be falling apart. Two of the wives are actually contemplating divorce. In this book, you’re going to read about their struggle to try to balance church life and to keep their marriages together.
I have been a preacher’s wife and I know how it affected my life, but I’ve neither been part of or even attended a mega church. Therefore, I can’t really relate much of my experience with this book. I would hate to think this is what it’s like “backstage” in these churches.
***A special thank you to litfuse for providing a review copy.***
Lisa Takeuchi Cullen was a longtime staff writer for TIME magazine. She now develops TV pilots for production companies and recently sold her first pilot for “The Ordained” to CBS. Born in Japan, Cullen lives in New Jersey with family.