Light of Hope

Vaughan's syrupy Christmas novella is set in the isolated village of Point Hope, Alaska, which residents believe to be the oldest continuously occupied community in North America. When oil scout Galen Scobey comes to Point Hope to determine whether exploratory drilling should commence there, the town is divided between those who welcome the revenue that oil development would bring and those who seek to preserve the area's fragile ecosystem. The story features a romantic interest for Galen (who is the stereotypical eligible widower of Christian fiction): his son's lovely schoolteacher, Ellie Springer, who is the best caribou hunter in town. The novella's romantic tension centers around a rather artificial conflict between Galen, who gave up religious faith when his wife died at Christmastime seven years earlier, and the townsfolk, who hold a community Christmas festival and pageant each year in the town school his son attends. When Galen refuses to allow his son to participate and hires an attorney to stop the festival's fusion of church and state, Ellie undertakes a dangerous--and rather silly--quest through a snowstorm to find a lawyer of her own. The plot is predictable and the characters one-dimensional, though the Alaska setting is unusual and well described. There are also welcome traces of humor, including those provided by a romance reader who insists on comparing the stages of Galen and Ellie's courtship to the characters in her books.