THE ROSE AND THE LILY: Lives and Times of Two South American Saints

Indefatigable novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes deserts fiction once more for hagiography in The Rose and the Lily as she recreates the lives and times of the great South American Saints -- Rose of Lima and Mariana of Quito. (Other ventures in this field have included Terese: Saint of a Little Way, Bernadette of Lourdes, St. Anne, Grandmother of Our Saviour). Mrs. Keyes' penchant for painstaking research and lavish description is pronounced in these detailed biographies of the two beautiful young women who lived their short lives in the turbulence of early seventeenth century Peru and Ecuador. St. Rose of Lima, first canonized saint of the new world, was an inspiring and vivid mystic whose flaming charity and compassion for suffering mankind marked her as one of the first real social workers. St. Mariana, patron saint of Ecuador, gained her title as the Lily of Quito by the exemplary purity, piety and charity of her life which she offered to God for her people at the age of twenty six. Despite an irritatingly over-long introduction Mrs. Keyes does weave a captivating story of two similar saints from an identical period of history which captures the sights, sounds and feelings of life in South America during the Spanish colonial period.