A moving, emotionally resonant tale of one woman’s crisis of faith.
A young nun’s commitment to her vocation is tested in this historical novel set in Peru.
On a June day in 1964, Sister Mary Katherine “Kate” O’Neill slips away from a convent in the Andean mountains. The 25-year-old American nun has fallen hopelessly in love with Tom Lynch, a priest. Troubled by her undeniable attraction to the fiery Irishman and “afraid of her own desire,” she flees in the night, with no money and no destination in mind. Over the next several days, she wanders throughout the South American country, connecting with kind strangers who help her on her journey. As she travels, she reflects on the events that have caused her to consider abandoning her calling. Meanwhile, flashbacks describe her childhood in St. Louis and time as a religious novice. In her novel, Wernicke, a former nun who once worked in Peru, turns what could be a simple tale of forbidden romance into something far more complex. Kate’s struggle isn’t just to reconcile her feelings for Father Tom with her calling to the sisterhood. She also wrestles with her purpose in coming to South America and whether her work is truly helping those she aims to serve. “Why are you here? Aren’t there problems in your own country?” a Peruvian police officer asks the runaway sister. The author vividly captures both Kate’s difficulty adapting to life in a foreign country where she barely speaks the language and her feelings of dislocation (both physical and spiritual) upon arriving in Peru. When she first meets Father Tom, altitude sickness causes her heart to race and makes it difficult to breathe, a preview of the way her love will eventually cause “a real physical hurt” in her heart. She must also struggle with unfamiliar feelings of doubt and a growing feeling that she may have no choice but to abandon the religious life that she chose as a teen. Sharply drawn supporting characters and rich descriptions of life in the Peruvian countryside add weight to the story.
A moving, emotionally resonant tale of one woman’s crisis of faith.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-759-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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