**Dearly Beloved

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Reviewed September 12, 2004.
Chicago Review Press, Chicago, 2003.  First published in 1962.  202 pages.

The back of my copy of Dearly Beloved calls it the sequel to Gift from the Sea, so I picked it up with delight.  I expected more meditations on life.  Instead, this book is a novel, presented by sharing the thoughts of different people attending and participating in a wedding ceremony, as the preacher goes through each phrase of the service.

As a novel, the book doesn’t exactly have a page-turning plot.  You’ll enjoy the book more if you think of it as a meditation on marriage, looking at marriage from many different perspectives.

“A wedding was not only a promise and a pledge made in the eye of God and man; it was a heightening of human life by the addition of something beyond it, something uncertain, intangible, impossible to prove.  An assertion of man’s belief in a quality of spirit—love.”