The Eliot Family Trilogy - The Bird in the Tree, Pilgrim’s Inn, and The Heart of the Family - by Elizabeth Goudge

I loved all 3 of these books. If you like British literature or are an Anglophile like me, you'll love these, too, and I'm sure anything by Goudge. They are all about the Eliot family, starting with the matriarch, Lucilla. As I'm thinking about these books, I just realized they remind me of the movie "Enchanted April."

Place plays a big role in these books -- two country houses where the family lives. You grow to love those places in the same way you love the characters. 

Here, in my sister's blog, she talks a little bit about Elizabeth Goudge.

Besides the homes, Goudge writes a lot about the woods nearby. I usually find it hard to read every word of descriptions of landscapes. I often skim them. But in these books, kind of like the homes, the woods become important, too, and I had no problem at all reading every word and picturing those woods.

I don't want to call it "supernatural," but there's a little bit of sixth sense, or maybe spirituality, or a kind of magic, maybe a sense of God's presence, in the books. There's a place in the woods where it is hinted that the children seem to meet a long-ago inhabitant who helped to heal the animals. There's some kind of spirit to the houses, perhaps also from a long ago inhabitant of the homes. There are times where the characters seem let to actions or places by a force beyond them.

This force, or whatever you may want to call it, felt good to me. I was glad to read about it and feel it. That's not always true for me. Sometimes that kind of thing causes fear or a spooky feeling, which happened in the one book by Isabel Allende that I read. I might call it a little Narnian but I wouldn't want you to think the books are fantasy or science fiction. Not at all.

The stories are excellent. Here is a good review, where the writer summarizes what they are about. I highly recommend these books.