Novel about convent life at the turn of the century. For the Sisters of the Crucifixion, each day is a ceaseless round of work, study, and prayer. Their daily life is itself an act of devotion.

Into this idyll setting enters Mariette. She is young, pretty, devout, but, as her medical father says, perhaps "too high-strung" for the convent.

Within a matter of weeks of convent life, Mariette, who goes into trances, experiences hallucinations and shows extremes of temperament, is convinced Jesus speaks directly to her. When she begins bleeding from unexplained wounds in her hands, feet, and sides, the convent is thrown into an uproar. Each nun has an opinion about the situation. Is Mariette a saint? Is she a lying, hysterical girl? Where is the line drawn between madness and faith or mysticism and eroticism?

I admit this book is not one I would have chosen to read if it hadn't been for a read & release challenge. The topic for the month of July 2007 is religion gone bad / mad. This book fits the bill. To me it is an example of religion at its most extreme.

RELEASE NOTES:

Sending as a controlled release to a bookcrosser in Minnesota.

Another bookcrosser kindly sent me this book in a controlled release. I received a recommendation from a good friend of mine and I look forward to reading this one.

A novel about a new postulant in an early 20th century convent who is afflicted/blessed with the stigmata. I was a bit turned off by the list of sisters in the convent, as well as their ages and jobs, in the front of the book because I knew it meant the author wasn''t going to do much to introduce the nuns in the prose, and I was right. So while flipping between the list at the beginning and the story itself was a bit annoying, I appreciated the author''s attention to detail in all other ways, the way he got up close to the many different women and perspectives in the convent, and especially his examination of how one woman (Mariette) stopped being perceived as a human being but instead became a symbol, and how he exposed our tendency to mold another human being''s life experiences to fit our own purposes. The ending was ambiguous, which was sort of a let down, although I can''t really imagine how else one can end a novel about stigmata. Powerful prose throug