A fun, deliciously scandalous, if unevenly written, depiction of queers in the clergy.
A novel chronicles the lives of gay Roman Catholic clergymen at odds with their chosen vocation and the LGBTQ+ community.
Canadian author Brown's busy, provocative tale about religion clashing with lifestyle examines the lives of two 20-something deacons. Jared Röhrbach and Paul Fortis, both handsome, gay men at a seminary school in Rome, are on the verge of ordination to the priesthood. Jared struggles with nightmares involving his disapproving entrepreneur father and stepmother as well as an emotionally turbulent, decadelong relationship with Paul. Complicating matters is the knowledge of Paul’s affair with Jared’s schoolmate Jeff Hensen. Right from the opening pages, the author paints this love triangle with a fiery flair for the dramatic. Jared absconds with Jeff’s private letters detailing the “juicy secrets” about his and Paul’s intimate summer dalliance. Paul grows more conflicted about his gay relationship and its contradiction with church canons. When Jared makes a hasty departure stateside, he decides to take advantage of his trust fund and romances Tony Keating, a sexy, sketchy hustler, while Paul accepts a challenging position to assist a reclusive monsignor. A rushed meeting reunites Paul and Jared, but more trouble lies ahead, as family secrets are revealed about Jared’s stepmother. Brown’s prose straddles the vigorous, the poignant, and the sordid in equal measure, particularly during moments when Jared embraces his wild side and when Paul’s faith is tested against his deeply felt attraction to Jared. Some scenes seem cobbled together without resolution, and the details of the characters’ motivations tend to feel rushed. Jared, for instance, is a restless protagonist who strains believability. Though he’s initially fully ensconced in his religious routines, he abandons everything for a luxurious life with Tony, then seamlessly returns to his ministerial duties with ambitions to become a bishop. As things progress, the plot becomes overstuffed and unwieldy with subplots involving twins and embezzlement. Though the characters lose some of their early allure, a surprise twist revives things. Brown channels his former vocation as a minister and spiritual director into creating a narrative that is authentically pious but riddled with sex and shocking secrets. For readers of queer romance yarns, this novel will satisfy on several levels as an engrossing, modern tale of faith versus freedom and feelings.
A fun, deliciously scandalous, if unevenly written, depiction of queers in the clergy.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9798668-6-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gibson-Brown Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A charming and incisive debut.
Four young nuns wind up running a halfway house full of quirky characters in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Four Catholic sisters live with the elderly Sister Roberta in upstate New York. All on the edge of turning 30, the young women are at loose ends: Their day care is shuttered, and Sister Roberta is retiring. However, the four women refuse to be parted: “We were fixed to one another, like parts of some strange, asymmetrical body: Frances was the mouth; Mary Lucille, the heart; Therese, the legs. And I, Agatha, the eyes.” Eventually, the Buffalo diocese decides to transfer them to Rhode Island, where they are put in charge of running Little Neon, a “Mountain Dew”–colored house for residents trying to get sober and get back on their feet. When the local Catholic high school needs someone to teach geometry, the sisters volunteer Agatha, who is labelled as the quietest but the smartest of the quartet. As Agatha immerses herself in her new life, she finds the residents of Little Neon, from parolee Baby to Tim Gary, whose disfigured jaw prevents him from finding love, open her eyes to new realities, as do her colleagues and students at the high school. Eventually, Agatha can no longer ignore that the church, and most of all she herself, is changing. Luchette’s novel, her first, is structured in small chapters that feel like vignettes from a slightly wacky indie film. The book is frequently vibrant with resonant images: Agatha learning to roller skate in Little Neon’s driveway or a resident drunk in a sequined dress riding a lawnmower through the snow. But even though the book feels light, Luchette does not turn away from the responsibility of examining the darkness undergirding the institution of the Catholic Church.
A charming and incisive debut.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-26526-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
A captivating Jewish twist on the classic American campus novel.
In Hopen’s ambitious debut, an Orthodox Jewish high school student finds his world transformed when his family moves to South Florida.
When protagonist Ari Eden leaves his bland life in Brooklyn—where he never felt deeply rooted—for a glitzy, competitive Modern Orthodox day school in the Miami suburbs, both readers and Ari himself are primed to expect a fish-out-of-water narrative. And indeed, Ari finds that his new classmates, though also traditionally observant by many standards, enjoy a lifestyle that is far more permissive than his own (a shade of Orthodoxy that is known as “yeshiva”). Suddenly Ari’s modest, pious world is replaced with a Technicolor whirlwind that includes rowdy parties, casual sex, drinking, drugs, and far more liberal interpretations of Jewish law than he has ever known. With its representation of multiple kinds of traditional Judaism, Hopen’s novel is a refreshing corrective to the popular tendency to erase the nuanced variations that exist under the umbrella of “Orthodoxy.” It also stands out for its stereotype-defying portrayal of Ari and his friends as teenagers with typical teenage concerns. But this is not just a novel about reorienting oneself socially or even religiously; though Ari’s level of observance certainly shifts, this is also not a simple “off the derech” (Jewish secularization) narrative. Ari’s new friend group, particularly its charismatic, enigmatic leader, Evan—a sort of foil for Ari—pushes him to consider new philosophical and existential norms as well as social, academic, and religious ones. The result is an entirely surprising tale, rich with literary allusions and Talmudic connections, about the powerful allure of belonging. This novel will likely elicit comparisons to the work of Chaim Potok: Like Potok’s protagonists, Ari is a religious Jew with a deep passion for literature, Jewish texts, and intellectual inquiry, and as in Potok’s fiction, his horizons are broadened when he encounters other forms of Orthodoxy. But Hopen’s debut may actually have more in common with campus novels like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Tobias Wolff’s Old School; its narrator’s involvement in an intense intellectual community leads him down an unexpected path that profoundly alters his worldview. The novel suffers due to its lamentably one-dimensional, archetypal female characters: the tortured-artist love interest, the ditsy blond, the girl next door. Hopen’s prose, and the scale of his project, occasionally feels overindulgent, but in that sense, form and content converge: This stylistic expansiveness is actually perfectly in tune with the world of the novel. Overall, Hopen’s debut signals a promising new literary talent; in vivid prose, the novel thoughtfully explores cultural particularity while telling a story with universal resonances.
A captivating Jewish twist on the classic American campus novel.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297474-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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