With a Name Like Love (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: With a Name Like Love Karen Coats Hilmo, Tess. With a Name Like Love. Ferguson/Farrar, 2011. 249p. ISBN 978-0-374-38465-4 $16.99 R Gr. 5–8. July, 1957, finds Ollie Love in Binder, Arkansas, one of the many three-day stops her family will make as they travel from Kentucky to Louisiana, sharing the gospel and bringing the joy of Christ to all who will come to their revival tent to hear Reverend Everlasting Love sing and preach. In Binder, though, Ollie finds a problem that might take more than three days to solve: a woman sits in jail awaiting trial for the murder of her husband, while her son, Jimmy, has intrigued Ollie’s compassionate nature and set her romantic thirteen-year-old heart a-fluttering. Although domestic abuse and murder form the backdrop and occasion for this story, the tale itself has a thoroughly sweet disposition, befitting the hazily naïve and romantic ideal of its time period; aside from two genuinely reprehensible bad actors and one horrific scene of animal abuse, more good things than bad happen, and the adults in the story are wise and caring, willing to listen to their children and then to act in responsible and effective ways so that a compassionate justice prevails. Adult and child readers weary of the cynicism and edgy gloom that pervades so much of children’s literature can breathe easy here, as Reverend Everlasting Love (and indeed the entire Love family) live up to their name. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois