Tag: Catholicism

blog tour · fiction · YA

TheWriteReads OnTour Presents Bad Habits by Flynn Meaney, Ultimate Blog Tour!!!

Stephanie2 Comments

Back today with another amazing Ultimate Blog Tour from TheWriteReads OnTour! This time in association with Penguin Random House (many thanks to them!). I’m pretty picky about my books, but as you all know, there are certain subjects that I absolutely leap at the chance to read, and as soon as I read the blurb for Bad Habits by Flynn Meaney (Penguin, 2021), I signed up. Religion in a YA? Check. Feminism? Check. SET IN A BOARDING SCHOOL? Oh yes. Hit me, Flynn Meaney! Pour that book directly into my brain, Penguin!

And the choice to be part of this tour was an excellent one, because I was laughing out loud within about three pages. Seriously. This book is hilarious! (If you’re sensitive to language, Bad Habits has quite a colorful vocabulary! But to be fair, I heard worse in the passing periods of my public high school hallway, and I learned to swear like a sailor while in Catholic grade school, so this was a bit like reliving my childhood.)

Alex doesn’t exactly fit in at St. Mary’s Catholic Boarding School, where she was sent after her parents divorced. She’s not exactly the prim and proper, plaid-wearing Catholic girl of their dreams; her purple faux-hawk, motorcycle boots, clove cigarettes, and ability to pick out even the slightest whiff of misogyny anywhere she goes (and it’s woven in deeply at St. Mary’s) have her constantly warming seats in the office, and this time, she’s close to the end. Deciding to finish things off once and for all, Alex decides to pull something St. Mary’s won’t be able to forgive her for: staging a school production of Eve Ensler’s award-winning play, The Vagina Monologues.

Easier said than done. The school isn’t exactly bending over backwards to help her make this happen. Her roommate, buttoned-to-the-neck-yet-boy-obsessed Mary Kate, is mortified to even whisper the word ‘vagina.’ Her fellow students’ more conservative manners don’t make them terribly receptive to Alex’s headstrong messages. But Alex has a lot to learn beyond how to make a proper scene…

Guys, I spent SO much of this book laughing. Alex is a LOT- she’s brash, crass, irritable, stubborn, and incredibly forward. She’s no-holds-barred, which frequently gets her in trouble- not that that worries her. But beyond being foul-mouthed and ill-tempered (quite often with good reason!), Alex is smart and quick on her feet. She’s the sharp, quick-witted YA character we all wished we could be, with cultural and literary references at the ready for every retort. I’m going to age myself here, but she would have fit in well on Dawson’s Creek. While at times she was a bit much, overall, I enjoyed her edge and her ability to eventually take a hard look at herself and grow where she needed to.

Her roommate Mary Kate is fun- boy-crazy in a sweet way, but there’s more than meets the eye there, as there is to every other character, something that Alex struggles to see in her dismissive efforts to caricaturize her classmates and school staff. Major props to Alex’s goody-goody classmate for making a killer Biblical argument at the end. Seriously, watch for this, it’s brilliant. The messages here- look deeper, understand where other people are coming from, notice what you have in common before you notice what divides you- aren’t heavy-handed, but woven into the narrative in a way that makes this book full of life lessons just a fun, funny, entertaining read. I laughed out loud so frequently while reading this that my husband was wondering what on earth I was doing upstairs.

I would’ve picked this up on my own if I hadn’t been part of the TheWriteReads Ultimate Blog Tour, but I’m glad I was so I can sing its praises early! Flynn Meaney has penned a sharp, thoughtful novel bursting with life and liveliness, and one that deserves its place on today’s YA shelves.

Huge thanks to Dave from TheWriteReads and the folks at Penguin Random House for including me in this blog tour!

Visit Flynn Meaney’s website here.

Follow Dave @ TheWriteReads on Twitter here.

Follow TheWriteReads OnTour here.

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fiction · middle grade

Book Review: Confessions of a Closet Catholic by Sarah Darer Littman

Stephanie4 Comments

One of the last tasks I had to complete for the 2020 PopSugar Reading Challenge– until my library holds come in, that is!- was to read the first book I touch on a shelf with my eyes closed. That happened to be Confessions of a Closet Catholic by Sarah Darer Littman (Puffin Books, 2005). I ran across this book earlier this year, pre-pandemic, at a local thrift store. It’s a late middle-grade book and the title intrigued me. I checked the book out on Goodreads before purchasing, however; I wasn’t looking for a faith-based novel (not my particular cup of tea, personally, though I’ve read a few okay ones in the past), but the reviews didn’t trend in that direction, so I coughed up a quarter and took it home (I love that thrift store so much).

Justine Silver has recently moved out of New York City and to the suburbs, where her new best friend, Mary Catherine, is Catholic. Justine’s intrigued, and so while Mary Catherine gives up chocolate for Lent, Justine decides…to give up being Jewish. Her secret practice of Catholicism, which takes place quite literally in her bedroom closet, involves confessing her sins to her teddy-bear-turned-priest, reciting the Hail Mary (just without the Jesus parts) and taking communion, which is made up of grape juice and last Passover’s matzoh. Close enough. Justine, whose family isn’t all that observant, is looking for religion she can connect with, and she’s hoping this is where she finds it.

Stress is running high in the Silver household, however. Bubbe, her grandmother, has just had a stroke. Justine’s worried she’s not going to get better. Her search for religious understanding causes even more disruption during this turbulent time, but it’s Bubbe who restores the family’s peace and helps Justine toward the path of ultimate understanding.

So. I really enjoyed this novel about a tween’s search for religious understanding. Justine is EveryKid at age eleven, quirky, awkward, nervous about all the changes in her life, and unsure of her place in this world. She’s searching for answers and meaning, and her parents haven’t done the best job of educating her in their own traditions in a way that grounds her. She sets off on a clandestine examination of her best friend’s faith, which seems mysterious and beautiful to her, testing it out in the only way she knows how, and when her secret practice is discovered, her parents aren’t happy. Justine’s grandmother intervenes the best she can, but ultimately it’s Justine who takes the reins and finds where she belongs on her own.

I’m not sure if this would have appealed to me at the age it’s meant for. It might have; I did enjoy reading explorations of religion even back then, but there are times when I felt that Kid Me might have found the story a little too esoteric for my maturity levels at that age. This is the type of book that I think would work best as a parent-child read, where you read it together and discuss afterwards. There are a lot of good topics to cover here: are we obligated to stay with the faith we’re born into, even if it doesn’t feel like home? What does it mean to try on a new faith? At what point should kids be able to make their own religious decisions? How should a family handle a child’s religious exploration, both of their own faith (if applicable) and of one that interests only the child? This should lead to some really great parent/child or family discussions, if everyone feels free to speak openly and honestly, without fear of retribution or shame.

Confessions of a Closet Catholic is a sweet book about a girl searching for a religious identity. I’m pleased to see that Sarah Darer Littman has written a plethora of other books; I really felt she covered a lot of the bases of a religiously questioning tween here and am looking forward to seeing if her obviously deep understanding of kids that age extends to other topics and ages. Have you read this or her other works? I’d love to hear about it! 🙂

(I feel like this review isn’t up to my normal standards; we bought a patio swing last week, and it turns out my old lady inner ears can no longer tolerate swinging for long periods of time. I’ve felt like I’ve been swinging for two days now, even though it’s been two days since I last got on the swing. Guess there’s a time limit for me! All that to say, it’s hard to come up with words when my brain and ears are making me feel slightly dizzy even when I’m sitting, so please forgive me.)

Visit Sarah Darer Littman’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction · religion

Stalking the Divine: Contemplating Faith with the Poor Clares- Kristin Ohlson

Stephanie3 Comments

Another one bites the dust!

Another book that’s had a longtime place on my TBR list, that is. Fitting right in with my fascination with cults and closed groups is a fascination with nuns. I was raised Catholic and attended Catholic grade school. We were taught by regular teachers, but our school librarian was, until she retired after my third grade year, a nun (Sister Grace!), whom I loved- I even wrote her a goodbye letter and cried a little when she left. She was a dear, sweet lady. The only other nun we had at school worked in what I think was the religious education office, and she was…not so sweet. I was never, ever interested in becoming a nun, but as an adult, I’ve definitely been interested in their lives, and thus Stalking the Divine by Kristin Ohlson (Plume Books, 2003) ended up on my TBR list (and, uh, stayed there, for far too long).

One Christmas, when her children were visiting their father, Kristin Ohlson finds herself longing for…something. Something she can’t quite name. A lapsed Catholic, she decides to attend Christmas mass and ends up at St. Paul’s in downtown Cleveland, home of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, an order of cloistered nuns whose mission it is to pray around the clock. She develops a deep fascination with the sisters, and though it takes some time, she’s able to gain access in order to write a newspaper magazine article on them, which becomes the basis of this book,

One by one, Ms. Ohlson interviews the aging sisters, whose order is shrinking. The sisters have faith, though; the Poor Clares have seen tough times before, and they know they’ll bounce back. Alongside her interview and writing, Ms. Ohlson involves herself in the life of St. Paul’s, attending mass, volunteering for different events and happenings in the parish, and contemplating her own faith- or lack thereof- the whole time. Ms. Ohlson isn’t quite a believer: she’s trying, and she hopes that her involvement with the sisters will help. Although she never quite reaches the level of true believer, the message from the sisters rings loud and clear to her: sometimes, you just have to keep showing up, even when the faith isn’t there.

Boy, this was captivating. It’s been a while since I read anything about nuns, and though I was a little nervous at the beginning about this being the right book at the right time (have you ever just not been able to read a book you really wanted to read, and it sent you into a reading slump? My brain’s been a little wonky lately, so I’ve been living in fear of this), but Ms. Ohlson’s light, yet informative style was exactly what I needed. Being able to slip behind the grates and listen to what life is like as a cloistered sister, living communally with vows of poverty and chastity, hearing about their struggles, their crises of faith, their difficulties living with one another, how they spend the majority of their days in silence, all of this had me absolutely riveted, and I blew through the book in less than two days.

Ms. Ohlson is honest about her struggles to believe; as someone who is fascinated by and drawn to religion as a whole without fully believing either, I found this refreshing and honest. She comes to a slightly different conclusion than I have in regards to the practice of faith (so far, that is; who knows what the future will bring?), but I enjoyed reading her journey and how she reached this place. I don’t have to share someone’s faith journey to appreciate and respect what they believe and how they come to believe it; reading about different beliefs never fails to keep me in a state of awe at what a wondrous place the world is. 🙂

If you’re interested in closed-off groups, this is a great read, and along these same lines, I highly recommend Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns by Cheryl L. Reed. This book covers many different orders of nuns, from the ones so service-oriented that they hardly find time to sleep or eat, to those who are so cloistered that they can barely manage to refuse an interview. I read this book back in…somewhere around 2005 and still think of it often.

Are you interested in closed-off, secretive groups? Do nuns fit into that category for you? As a child, I wouldn’t have believed that this would be a subject of interest for me as an adult, but, well, here I am. 🙂

Visit Kristin Ohlson’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction · religion

Heretics Anonymous- Katie Henry

Stephanie6 Comments

I read about Heretics Anonymous by Katie Henry recently on someone else’s blog (and for the life of me, I can’t remember who; if it was you, please leave me a comment and I’ll credit you with a link to your review here! This made me realize I need to start writing down where I find all these great recommendations). The cover alone made me laugh, and the premise made it sound like it was my kind of book. Religion in YA? Bring it on!

Thanks to his father’s job, Michael’s moved a lot throughout his life, and this time he’s landed at a private Catholic high school. Which wouldn’t be the biggest deal, except he’s an atheist, so it’s a little uncomfortable. Feeling out-of-place and friendless on his first day, Michael latches on to Lucy after her no-holds-barred response against the quote about well-behaved women rarely making history in theology class. Surely Lucy’s like him, not fitting in among all these sheeple.

Except Lucy does believe. Maybe not exactly the way the Church would want her to, but she still counts herself in. In spite of this, Lucy drags Michael with her to the group of friends who have dubbed themselves Heretics Anonymous, which includes a gay Jewish boy, a Reconstructionist Pagan girl, and a dresscode-flaunting Unitarian. Together, they decide to start shaking things up at the school. Rules, especially the pointless ones made by hypocrites, were made to be broken, right?

At first, exposing the school’s hypocrisy merely triggers debate amongst the student body, but when Michael’s family situation causes him to make a few decisions based on anger, the real-life repercussions begin to fall outside of the group. It’s no longer fun and games when everyone’s getting hurt, and Michael will have to use what he’s been learning at St. Clare’s Preparatory School in order to make things right.

This is a laugh-out-loud book (I figured the people sitting by me in the library were going to think I was nuts, with my constant chuckling as I turned the pages) with themes of justice, redemption, and self-reflection. Ms. Henry never gets in the reader’s face with a message; rather, she lets the group of friends’ actions and emotions speak for themselves. The friends are able to engage in spirited but productive debate over issues such as dress code and the school’s firing of a married lesbian teacher, defending each other when appropriate, telling each other to back off when necessary. While they may not always agree perfectly with each other or with the Church and school, their ability to express their feelings on each matter at hand and make the others understand the importance of their position is invigorating. Far from being a heavy-handed morality message, I think Ms. Henry has written a great example of what a cohesive friend group should look like here.

I attended Catholic school from two years of preschool all the way up until eighth grade graduation, and while I no longer consider myself Catholic, a lot of this rang true for me, particularly the religious jokes (I think we all made the joke about cannibalism at one point in our many, many hours of religion class) and the seething debate over religious issues and doctrine (I don’t remember one girl in my class who was okay with the idea of never using birth control, and you better believe we pushed back on that one). I do remember a few students who were more pious than others, but none quite as extreme (or as snotty about it) as Theresa…but then again, we were a pretty small school, so I’m sure students like her exist somewhere.

There was a moment that stopped me in this book, that surprised me. Close to the end of Chapter 14, Lucy brings up the Magnificat. *(If you’re not familiar, it’s from the Gospel of Luke, 1:46-55, where Mary sings after she’s been told she’s going to give birth to the son of God.) It’s Lucy’s favorite because it’s revolutionary, and she tells Michael about how it was banned in Argentina in the 1970’s after being used by mothers of people killed by the military, and how it was banned in Spain in the 1930’s by Francisco Franco. This all struck a chord with me, not because I was familiar with it (I can’t remember if we were taught the significance of the Magnificat or not), but because I’d recently read something about it and couldn’t remember where. When I got home, to my surprise I actually found it again, a Washington Post article titled ‘Mary’s ‘Magnificat’ in the Bible is revolutionary. Some evangelicals silence her.’ Up until the point I read this article back in December, I had no idea how revolutionary or subversive these verses have been considered, and it was fascinating to me to see this pop up again in my life.

This was really a fun, funny, thought provoking book. I see that Ms. Henry has another book coming out in August of this year, titled Let’s Call It a Doomsday; you better believe I’ll be breaking down the library door to check out a copy!

Visit Katie Henry’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.