HUNT FOR HEAVEN

The author of The Wall Between and The Trembling Years again writes of the pull between belief and training in the story of the double conflict in Rebecca Bliss' life. For Rebecca, her father, John is the guiding symbol of goodness and right, so that she follows him into his call from Chicago, after the Haymarket killings, to a donated farm, just outside Ararat, Pennsylvania, where, with the faithful, another Utopia is to be experienced. Dan Braden, who is obligated by promises and financial security, turns up to expose the Christian colony -- and finds no basis for his scurrilous articles, falls in love with Rebecca, and yet cannot truthfully join the group wholeheartedly. His backing and filling runs parallel to Bliss' own doubts about the validity of his vision, to the trouble caused by luxury-seeking Polly, who returns to leave her baby son with the colony, to Rebecca's being trained by her father to carry on the leadership, and to the internal conflicts within the settlement. Until it is an act of God that writes a finis to the experiment and frees Rebecca for Dan. A sober novel in serious vein.