Why Readers Love Small-Town Christian Romance

elizabethmarieromance.com

My husband has lived in the Richmond area all his life, so wherever we go, he seems to know someone, and he can often be found chatting at the supermarket while I wait at home for some needed ingredient. After over thirty years here, I know many people too, partly through church and community life and partly because I spent so many years working as a dentist.

Living on a 150-acre farm in the Tasman region means there is very little chance of remaining completely anonymous. But most of our sense of being known has come through our church community. Over the years, we have shared ordinary Sundays, family milestones, hard seasons, and the kind of practical care that often arrives before you have worked out how to ask for it. Neighbors help bring the cattle in without expecting to be paid, and people turn up for garden working bees because there is a job to be done and many hands will make it easier. Life in a close community is not always private or uncomplicated, but more often than not, being noticed becomes a kindness.

There is something in that, I think, that readers are quietly hungry for. When surgery, sickness, or grief comes, meals are offered, and parcels of food sometimes appear at the door.

That is the world I try to build in Seacliff Shores, and I think it is the real reason readers keep coming back to small towns, even fictional ones. Not because life there is easier. Grief still visits. Guilt still lingers. Storms still knock the power out. But nobody carries it alone for long, because somebody always notices, and somebody always shows up.

“Nobody carries it alone for long, because somebody always notices, and somebody always shows up.”

Scripture puts it plainer than I ever could. “God sets the lonely in families” (Psalm 68:6, WEB).

Not simply households bound by blood, but the wider family a town becomes when it decides to pay attention to its own. I love that our homegroup, although not bound together by blood, aims to be family for each other, meeting prayer and practical needs. I think that is what a small-town romance is really offering a reader, underneath the love story. A glimpse of what it might feel like to be known that thoroughly, and loved anyway.

We live in a season where so much of daily life passes through a screen, where a person can go days without anyone noticing whether they are struggling. I understand why a story set in a place like Seacliff Shores, where the barista remembers your order and your grief in the same breath, feels like relief rather than fantasy. It is not that readers believe such towns are perfect. It is that they remember, somewhere, wanting to be part of one.

That longing shows up again and again in the Seacliff Shores books, though I try never to force it. Summer Avery spends most of A Cornerstone for Her Heart believing she has to carry her family alone, until a broken washing machine and a stubborn, gentle carpenter prove her wrong, one practical act at a time. Emily Harper arrives in A Harbor for Her Heart certain that nobody in a new town could possibly want to know her story, and finds out how wrong she is, one cup of coffee and one hard conversation at a time. Neither woman goes looking for a community. It finds them anyway, the way God’s grace finds us, even when we are sure we have wandered somewhere beyond its reach.

Where could I go from your Spirit?

Or where could I flee from your presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, you are there.

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there!

If I take the wings of the dawn,and settle in the uttermost parts of the sea,

even there your hand will lead me,and your right hand will hold me.

If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me;

the light around me will be night,”

even the darkness doesn’t hide from you,

but the night shines as the day.

The darkness is like light to you.

— Psalm 139:7–12 (WEB)

Maybe that is worth sitting with today, whether or not you ever open one of my books. Is there a version of that kindness already near you, a neighbor, a church, a friend, waiting on you to let them notice? And is there someone nearby who might need you to be the one who shows up for them?

If you would like to spend more time in Seacliff Shores, that is where these stories live. You can begin with  A Harbor for Her Heart, and if you would like to be the first to know when the next one is ready, I would love to welcome you to my readers’ list at elizabethmarieromance.com. (And A Cornerstone for Her Heart comes out July 24)

Thank you for spending these few minutes with me. I hope it brought a little warmth to your day, and maybe a reason to visit Seacliff Shores for yourself.

Scripture quotations are taken from the World English Bible (WEB), which is in the public domain.