Saints for All Occasions
I opened the following email yesterday and thought ‘WAIT! I have that ARC here, now I know what to read next.’
So along with other Washington Post book club readers, I am going to start this book today and read it for June.
The following is the ‘teaser’ for the book. Sounds like I am going to enjoy it!
Nora and Theresa Flynn are twenty-one and seventeen when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she’s shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn’t sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan—a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand. Fifty years later, Nora is the matriarch of a big Catholic family with four grown children: John, a successful, if opportunistic, political consultant; Bridget, quietly preparing to have a baby with her girlfriend; Brian, at loose ends after a failed baseball career; and Patrick, Nora’s favorite, the beautiful boy who gives her no end of heartache. Estranged from her sister, Theresa is a cloistered nun, living in an abbey in rural Vermont. Until, after decades of silence, a sudden death forces Nora and Theresa to confront the choices they made so long ago. A graceful, supremely moving novel from one of our most beloved writers, Saints for All Occasions explores the fascinating, funny, and sometimes achingly sad ways a secret at the heart of one family both breaks them and binds them together.
Happy Reading!
PEACE
OH MY HEART!!
I just absolutely LOVED this book. So real, so raw, so like my family and so many families I know. The story is hauntingly beautiful. So much truth in the pages it takes your breath away. The following two passages had me about heaving with sobs. “Someone could save your life without you ever knowing it. It happened more than most people realized.” and “Motherhood brought with is so much repetition. She marveled at the sandwiches alone. She had made thousands by now. Tens of thousands. Her children were there in the dark half-moons beneath her eyes, a product of sleeplessness brought on by colic, by strep throat, by a teen age boy sneaking out again. Motherhood was a physical act as much as an emotional one. It took every part of you.”
What an amazing read.
Peace.
