The Lamplighter (Paperback)

The Lamplighter, one of the more popular books in the country when it was released in the mid-19th century, is the engaging story of a undisciplined and unloved girl who has her life transformed, by Providence, through the love of strangers, whose ties to her are greater than anyone initially suspects. It is well told and well written. It does start off slow, but moves fast after the girl -- Gertrude, or "Gerty" -- grows up. The last half of the book is, in particular, hard to put down. The "surprises" in the book are predictable, but the predictability is made up for in joy and the rewarding of goodness. It is primarily a story of the fruit of gratefulness, and secondarily a love story, though some may reverse the two. It is a religious book; the Bible is appropriately exalted. But a warning: While the third-person narrator rightly declares very early in the book that Christ died for Gerty, the two subsequent statements to the young Gerty, from two of the most noble characters, about how she might obtain a heavenly home instruct her "if you're good" and "if you try to be good and love everybody." Such instructions, which no character bothers to correct, are a rejection of the gift offered in the form of Christ's fully effective atoning sacrifice on the cross, and perhaps stem from the author's position, according to one brief biography, as a Sunday School teacher in a Unitarian church.