I do, on occasion, voluntarily read lit-fic, even dare I say, get excited about it! And that is usually when there is some sort of weird hook to the premise. Here, it’s nuns. I’ve had a weird thing with nuns ever since I watched The Trouble With Angels as a child, and I can’t explain it. I think they are funny and interesting and weird, and some of them were completely demented (my mom had a nun teacher in the early 1960s who used to throw a mophead at children who annoyed her during class). It’s like, how many reasons are there why a woman would be shut away, married off to God, and then spend the rest of her life wearing a fancy black hoodie and contemplating the universe? So many reasons.
This book takes place in the 12th century during the rule of Eleanor of Aquitane, who banishes our main character, Marie (a fictionalized portrayal of Marie de France) to an abbey to get her unruly and unwanted presence out of court. The abbey is extremely impoverished (many of the nuns are literally starving to death), and they are fresh off an outbreak of some sort of plague-ish thing that cut their numbers significantly. And young Marie isn’t just there to be a nun, but to be the prioress, the head nun. At first she does everything in her power to not fit in, sure she will be rescued and brought back to court to bask in the presence of her beloved Eleanor (who she is in love with), but when she realizes she’s there for good, and that she has it within her power to make the abbey not just a good place to live, but a spiritually wholesome, welcoming place, she begins to do so, with style.
My favorite thing about this book was the dark humor. I read most of this not at home and I forgot my tabs, so I was only able to mark a couple of passages, but here’s an early one as an example of the somehow simultaneously beautifully written and yet also full of grodiness that made me laugh out loud just from surprise:
“Goda has the affronted air of someone who lurks in corners to hear herself spoken ill of so that she can hold tight a grievance to suckle.”
The whole book is like that, and by now if you have been reading my reviews you know that there is nothing I appreciate more than a book that goes back and forth between opposite tones: humor and drama, elegance and disgusting descriptions of bodies, with the ease this book does. Life is not one-toned and books should not be either, in my opinion.
What really gets you in the end is the community that Marie builds for herself and her fellow nuns. I ended the book and was like, well that was five stars. And it’s really not that long. I read it in a day. I very much recommend this one, even if you don’t normally like historical fiction, or literary fiction. Not sure if I will be reading more of this author’s books, but I’m glad this one was a rousing success.
