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Saints for All Occasions

by Lucy S

In a review in The Washington Post, Ron Charles says, “In a simple style that never commits a flutter of extravagance, Sullivan draws us into the lives of the Raffertys and, in the rare miracle of fiction, makes us care about them as if they were our own family.”

Though the plot of her new book, Saints for All Occasions, takes place over the course of only a few days, J. Courtney Sullivan carries us back and forth through time with the story of two sisters, Nora and Theresa, as they emigrate from Ireland to Boston in the 1950s, and the separate paths they follow once they arrive. Once in Boston, Theresa becomes pregnant and Nora and her husband raise the child as their own. This deception creates a rift between the sisters and lays the ground work for many more secrets within multiple generations of their family.

It is Nora’s story that lies at the heart of this book, even as she only ever seems to know who she is in relation to others, a wife to her husband, a mother to her children, and most challengingly, a sister to Theresa. Nora would like life to follow a plan, with her at it’s helm, but people are messy and they disappoint and confound her, remaining unknowable to her. Nora conveniently seems to forget parts of her life that don’t fit into her imagined order and thus becomes mired in deceit. As the mother of four children, Nora must manage how much she actually wants to know about the people she has raised. “This, then, was the hardest part of being a parent. Your children had their private worlds, where you could never protect them. They were yours and yet not yours.”

Nora’s sister, Theresa, ends up in a convent in Vermont and becomes Mother Cecilia. She initially goes there to escape, but what she finds in herself as a nun gives her more happiness than Nora will ever know. “To sit alone with your thoughts in silence for so long, you had no choice but to confront them. The calm came not from slipping a habit over one’s head but from facing down all that plagued you and coming out the other side.”

Sullivan delves into weighty issues such as religion, birth-control, family, love, loss, and addiction, without ever getting too heavy-handed or sentimental. She carries us along through the strength of her characters, so that they will stick with us, even after the last page.

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