The Dogwood Gospel by Cindy Morgan

The Dogwood Gospel by Cindy Morgan
Series: Standalone
Publisher: Tyndale Fiction (October 13, 2026)

REVIEW BY PRISCILLA BETTIS

Cindy Morgan is a real-life Contemporary Christian Music star (cindymorganmusic.com) who’s won a bazillion music awards. In her lyrics, she fuses down-to-earth narratives with spiritual journeys, and the result intensifies listeners’ emotions. But The Dogwood Gospel is a book, not a song. Fortunately, Morgan’s lyric-writing ability is echoed in this novel.

I’m not sure whether to call the genre of this book Christian historical fiction, domestic suspense, police procedural, coming-of-age, or cold-case mystery because it’s all of those things.

The story starts in 1941 in Kentucky. Charlotte (or “Charlie”) is orphaned when she’s a toddler and taken in by sweet Rose and her horrible husband, Arlo. Rose and Arlo attend a strict church. There are nice people there, but both Arlo and the preacher, Brother Williams, are more interested in power than the Gospel. Thankfully, another preacher, a kind and wise man named Brother Mike, shows up later in the book; otherwise this would be a grim Christian novel!

When Charlie is a teenager, she runs away and joins the circus, or the “carnival” as they call it in this case. As the carnival arrives at a particular town, teens start missing. Is it a coincidence? Enter the police chief, Curtis Cates. Charlie’s adventures at the carnival and Cates’ investigation of the missing teens take up most of the novel.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the carnival—the acts, the animals, the work that is involved in running a carnival, and the bonds between outcasts (runaways like Charlie, people with congenital disabilities, and those who have strange talents). Morgan based the carnival workers on historic personalities like Miran Dajo (the man who felt no pain) and Jeanie Tomaini (the woman with no legs). The workers come from tragic backgrounds, and the carnival offers them a home. Spider, a carnival boy who befriends Charlie, says:

Look, Charlie, no one ends up here because we had a good life back home. That’s just not the way it is with carnies. We belong to each other because we don’t belong anywhere else.

-Cindy Morgan, The Dogwood Gospel

Charlie is a horse enthusiast, so horses feature prominently in the book. Charlie’s exhilarating rides and skillful tricks are amazing. Horse lovers will enjoy those scenes. Morgan makes the horses three dimensional with their own personalities and histories and character journeys. I cried twice over the course of this book, and both times it was because of a horse.

Did I enjoy the book? Yes! And I liked the way Morgan showed two prominent characters growing in their faith without it being sappy. But I was thrown out of my reading a few times. The story takes place in the 1940s and 1950s, but there are some modern-day elements that sneak in. For example, high-fives weren’t part of American culture until the 1970s, and the phrase “girl time” didn’t come about until the 1980s. So I took off half a fish.

I took off another half a fish because so much goes on in this book. I got a little dizzy with all the layers of plot, the two timelines, and all the characters (thirty-seven last I counted). Personally, I prefer a book that does more with less.

Still, the book kept me up way past my bedtime several nights in a row, so it’s definitely an engaging read. I give music-star Cindy Morgan’s debut novel four fish!

I read The Dogwood Gospel through NetGalley (thank you, Tyndale Fiction!).