A woman on difficult terms with her family comes home reluctantly to the B.C. farm where she grew up. Years ago she distanced herself from the religious faith that gives her parents much solace, and while she dearly loves them, she is a ball of nerves at the very idea of homecoming. In the background lie guilt, the death of a beautiful young man, old friends who know too much, love, hate – in short, the whole damn thing. Never fear, though: a couple of hundred pages later, ghosts will be laid to rest, the truth will out, and our heroine will go on, a stronger and wiser woman, as well as a better mother herself.

Sounds like a pretty good story, doesn’t it? But who would have thought it would turn up in two novels published in the same season? That is just what has happened with The Valley by Gayle Friesen and After River by Donna Milner.

Gloria, Friesen’s protagonist, is the  younger heroine – somewhere in her late thirties or early forties – and her family are fundamentalist Mennonites. Milner’s heroine, Natalie, is in her fifties, and the family’s faith is Roman Catholic. Both characters have husbands who love them enough to put up with their neuroses, and daughters who tolerate them with a certain amount of grace. Even the circumstances of the tragedies that befall the young men they once loved are similar.

Despite the rather predictable plotting, though, each novel is a page-turner – I read past midnight to finish After River, and looked forward to returning to The Valley every evening. Reading the two books one after the other proved once again that it is not the story a writer tells that is important, but how the tale is told.

Milner obviously wants to deal with some of the major issues of the last 50 years, among them religious bigotry, corruption in high places, homophobia, the legacy of the Vietnam war, and sexual incompatibility. Richard “River” Jordan, a draft dodger, is the book’s pivotal character – a Christ-like figure who, despite his long hair, guitar, and “wacky tobaccy,” finds his place on Natalie’s family’s dairy farm. Everybody loves River, and that is part of the problem for Natalie and for the novel. Milner allows River to explain himself in stilted speeches that almost, but not quite, drain the life out of the book. It is as if Milner set out to pay tribute to a set of  ideas, and hung them on River the way her heroine’s mother pegs washing to the clothesline in the book’s opening pages. Luckily, Milner’s story has enough plot turns to keep the reader going.

Gayle Friesen has written several YA novels, and it shows in the expert way she captures the rhythms and rock ’n’ roll of her characters’ speech. Gloria and her friends mock the way her mother, because of her deep faith, always gives a positive spin to events. When a neighbour has a stroke, she reports: “It affected his speech … but you know, he wasn’t much of a talker anyway.”

The girls riff on this “the Lord knows best” attitude with exchanges like:

“Looks like the valley might flood this winter.”
“But we could swim to church.”
“Now that’s a blessing.”

And:

“Helmut Wiebe took his shirt off on the church workday.”
“But not his pants.”
“Now that’s a blessing.”

At the same time, however, it is Friesen who better succeeds at handling weightier moral and ethical questions in her fiction. Take, for example, the enormous question of faith. Rather than pontificate, Friesen has the teenage Gloria and her brother wrangle about Bible stories. Gloria takes every detail seriously, but Jake insists that they’re only stories, after all – that it’s believing in a merciful God that’s important. In a page and a half filled with sibling squabbling, Friesen brings us a profound reflection on the nature of belief.

Both Friesen and Milner are working in territory already explored by many other Canadian writers. Neither of their books compares with the best of Miriam Toews or Alice Munro, but both will please many readers – and not just those who have fled small towns.