A raucously funny yet heartfelt and illuminating tale of holy orders at their most chaotic.
Rogue nuns and a psychic novice reinvigorate a failing convent in this comic novel.
Hartley’s rollicking yarn centers on Our Lady of the Highway, a run-down convent in a grim, industrial area of Brooklyn where the sisters have spent 347 years praying nonstop in shifts for world peace. But with only three nuns left, the youngest being the 71-year-old Mother Superior, Sister Bernadette, their vigil will sputter out unless the parish priest can find new blood. Such materializes in the form of Sister Magdalena, who’s a fugitive thanks to righteous crimes, such as sinking a freighter full of weapons bound for a Venezuelan coup. She brings along Sisters Evelyn and Veronica, both with equally shady resumes. Taking over as Mother Superior, Magdalena scandalizes Bernadette by starting a microbrewery to cater to Brooklyn hipsters. Meanwhile, the sisters fend off the machinations of a tycoon who wants to turn the convent into a sewage treatment plant. Further stirring the pot is Lola, a former insurance claims adjuster with psycho-kinetic powers that result in stopped clocks, shattered glass, or collapsing fire escapes when she gets upset. She joins the convent thinking it’s a calm place where she can’t hurt anyone. With a marketing plan of offering intercessory prayers for customers who buy beer and having Lola do pin-up posters in an off-the-shoulder habit, the convent does a boffo business and signs up dozens of new nuns—until the police, the FBI, and the National Guard come for Magdalena. Hartley, a celebrated indie film director, writes in a confidently cinematic style, filling the novel with quirky, sharply drawn characters; multiple viewpoints and flashbacks; exquisitely carved, imagistic vignettes—“Confident, preoccupied, serious but smiling, Magdalena is uncomplicated, graceful and selfless even as she pauses to slip a handgun into her ankle boot”—and hilarious deadpan dialogue. (“Mother Superior, may I ask a question?” “Of course.” “Are you all wanted by the law?”) For all its farcical elements, the story is an inquisitive depiction of the cloistered life, exploring its seething tensions and energetic discipline and taking seriously its commitments. (“In reality,” Bernadette muses, “God doesn’t make himself known to you except through the miracles of endurance and selflessness.”) The result is an entertaining but thoughtful spoof.
A raucously funny yet heartfelt and illuminating tale of holy orders at their most chaotic.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73792-743-3
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Elboro Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
