Status Updates From The Stokesley Secret

Davy wiping off the kiss. 😅🤣

CMY is such a master at writing believable family dynamics and characters! ❤️

OK, now I’m stressed…!

Loving this so much!

And also in Chapter 7: “A new week was a new starting-point, and he meant to spend this one well. For indeed it is one of the blessings of our lives that we have so many stages—days, weeks, years, and the like—from each of which we may make fresh starts, feel old things left behind, and go on to lead a new life.” ❤️

Chapter 7—“People would often gladly put away from their children or friends the very trials that are sent by Heaven to prove and strengthen their will and power of resisting self-indulgence.” ❤️

Characters truly are formed little by little, and not all at once! There might be a fairly overt moral message here, but it’s completely charming nonetheless!

God bless Christabel! She’s sure got her hands full! 😮‍💨

❤️❤️❤️

Chapter 3—loving this ever so much! CMY has such an intelligent, truthful, strong way of speaking about personal sanctification that doesn’t just reduce it to “being nice,” or some other anemic quality that is meant to be so much more than it’s been oversimplified to. ❤️❤️❤️

Yonge’s pastoral writing in this, in the descriptions of the countryside, is just breathtaking! And the family is DELIGHTFUL! It seems as though one of the themes of the novel is going to be the pursuit and recognition of beauty in our lives, which excites me! The transcendentals—truth, goodness, and beauty—are so often neglected in our current artistic scene of “message art”. I’m loving this so much!

Delightful in every way!

“Yes,” said Anne; “but Aunt Alice is so finikin and fidgety; she never wets her feet, and can’t get over a stile, and is afraid of a cow; and he wants us all to be like her.”

😂

“A new week was a new starting-point, and he meant to spend this one well. For indeed it is one of the blessings of our lives that we have so many stages—days, weeks, years, and the like—from each of which we may make fresh starts, feel old things left behind, and go on to lead a new life.”

Up to chapter five.