I really enjoyed J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occassions so I looked for some of her previous work. Maine follows a similar pattern- middle class Irish Catholic matriarchal family on the East coast with family drama bursting at the seams. Alice Kelleher’s husband, Daniel, won the land their beloved summer home sits on in a bet decades ago; Daniel is long gone and Alice has decided to donate their home to the local church after her death. Her donation is penance for a secret she’s kept for decades, […]
Family Secrets
I swear someone posted a review of this on CBR but I can’t find the post now… Saints for All Occasions is one of those generational tales that bounces between the present day and the events in the past that shaped the landscape of the future. It’s a popular storytelling device, even more popular now with TV shows like This is Us, that works well here. In the past Nora and Theresa Flynn are sisters who leave their family farm in Ireland for a new future […]
“There were so many ways to be twenty-six years old…”
Celia, Sally, Bree, and April meet their freshman year at Smith College, and the four of them couldn’t be more different. Celia is our narrator, a lapsed Catholic who had the foresight to smuggle a bottle of vodka in to her suitcase. Sally is recovering from the loss of her mother just months before, and unsure she is willing – or able – to make friends and enjoy college. Bree has arrived with a diamond ring on her finger and the next fifty years of […]