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PAGAN’S VOWS by Catherine Jinks Kirkus Star

PAGAN’S VOWS

by Catherine Jinks

Pub Date: Sept. 1st, 2004
ISBN: 0-7636-2021-1
Publisher: Candlewick

Equal parts Boethius and blackmail, this third volume of a projected quartet sends wise-cracking ex-street-kid Pagan Kidrouk and his best friend/father figure Roland Roucy de Bram into the bookish but far from otherworldly confines of a 12th-century Benedictine monastery. With his usual gift for landing in the soup, not only does Pagan struggle to adapt to the (supposedly) ascetic monastic life style, he’s singled out for relentless grilling in Latin, Rhetoric, and other scholastic studies, cottons to an extortion scheme involving alms money and a fugitive pederast, and worriedly watches Roland, devout but shaken to his soul by the heartbreaking events of Pagan in Exile (2004), wasting away. Nothing like the cloistered life for peace and quiet. As before, Pagan’s mix of bad attitude and profound loyalty make a winning combination, and readers will come (or continue) to care as deeply as he does for his troubled, deeply decent companion. Humor? Rage? Agony? Spiritual journeys? Murder? Moral turpitude? Twists both welcome and dismaying? This decidedly unique historical saga has it all. (Fiction. 12-15)