Book · Book · 2017
Pass it on
Saints for All Occasions
64Watch it awake.
A modern novel that still knows the parish, the secret, and the cost of a story a family agrees to tell.
The review
Sullivan is not writing a heritage poster. She is writing the kind of secret Irish-Catholic families actually kept. That earns it a place here. It does not earn it a claim to be the old country's voice. The piety is believable because it binds and because it can be used to hide.
Read it as a late chapter, after the immigrant books, not instead of them.
Journal
Keep Saints for All Occasions in the record.
No house has filed a sentence for this yet.
Live Historic number 64. Yours can differ.
The glance
Republic is the thin one.
Does anyone owe a neighbor, a law, or a town — or is every person out for themselves?
This phone is set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.
Consider this
My Ántonia
76 instead of 64
My Ántonia is still a novel book, and it scores 76 instead of 64. What you gain is industry: Sod houses, hired girls, a farm that either holds or breaks the people on it.
The eight
- 6Industry
Work and child-raising. The economic life is plain.
- 7Household
Sisters and children. The lie is told to protect a household and then rules it.
- 7Piety
The convent is a real vocation, not a costume.
- 6Courage
Both women live with a choice that cannot be made clean.
- 5Republic
An Irish-Catholic New England world, observed more than defended.
- 6Temperance
Shame is taken seriously. The novel does not enjoy it.
- 8Truth
The family story and the truer story are both kept in view.
- 6Stewardship
The question is what the next generation is owed: the legend or the fact.
Where to read
Finding the page.
Live Historic · Saints for All Occasions · 64IMDb
