And Then They Were Nuns: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A gorgeous book
Review: For nearly forty years, a group of women have lived in a religious community in rural California. Some have come and gone, some have come and stayed, and almost all have been affected by the quiet and steady ways of living at Julian Pines Abbey. These interconnected stories show their diversity: nuns and battered wives, lesbians and straight women, women both celibate and sexually celebratory. "And Then They Were Nuns" is a witty and gloriously charming novel about these women, and a welcome invitation to a beautiful way of living in spiritual harmony with each other and the world.

Rating:
Summary: A Delightful Read!
Review: Susan Leonardi has written a delightful novel. Her story is heartfelt and hilarious. And her characters are so real, you feel as if you can reach out and touch them. A great read!

Rating:
Summary: Warm, funny, wise, unexpected
Review: Susan Leonardi's novel "And then they were nuns" is warm, funny, wise and unexpected. Also fresh and thought-provoking. Each chapter is free-standing but the interlocking characters and progess of time unite the book into a whole. It's an engrossing read, and stays with the reader afterwards. Underneath, it's about living your values. The title is a little flippant, compared to the substance of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Rich and Eloquent and Full of Surprises
Review: The women living at Julian Pines, a monastic abbey out in the sticks of California, lead contemplative lives, help the surrounding community, take in "strays," and exist communally in as much serenity as possible, that is, in "silence, order, peace, prayer, and simple pleasures." Except when someone is having internal struggles or two women are at odds or the summer is too hot or the winter too cold or any number of amusing intrusions from the outside world occur, which is to say, most of the time. In other words, Julian Pines, for all its rustic beauty, hard work, and peacefulness is also a place full of excitement and change. "(T)he essence of life at Julian Pines...was the blank pageness of it, the way you had to invent life every day and eschew the hierarchical assumption that peace and passion were mutually exclusive" (p. 109). At the heart of these beautiful and wonderful stories, it is peace and passion that many of the women struggle to reconcile most--and often with very wry consequences.

From a variety of points of view, author Susan Leonardi tells a series of interlocking stories, each of which could probably stand on its own. Taken together, however, they are rich and eloquent and full of surprises. By the end of the book, you feel you know these characters very well. My favorites were Karen, who loves Anne and is the resident priest (despite loud objections from an estranged sister convent and no approval from Rome); Bernadette, whose childhood set her up to be a "helper" to others, a state of mind from which I was very glad she finally escaped; Beatrice, the abbess, who shares a calm, accepting-and sometimes breathtaking-wisdom in many of her encounters; Donna, a veterinarian who relates better to animals than people and actually "sees" people as various animal types; Sharon, the school teacher who came for a brief visit, wrote a series of letters to her fiancé and friends extending the visit, then eventually stayed on permanently; Sierra, the youngster who, at the end of the book, reflects back both the goodness and the quirkiness of the place; and lastly, Anne, the writer, who loves everyone and is so filled with passion and life that I wish I knew her in the real world.

One of the cleverest chapters (besides the humorous one entitled "Anne's List of Sixty-Five Good Reasons for Being a Nun at Julian Pines Abbey and One Bad One") has a befuddled Theresa trying to understand the purpose and intent of Anne's fiction writing. Anne has taken the bare bones of one of Theresa's experiences and embellished extravagantly until the story has theme, purpose, and depth-but isn't Theresa's experience anymore. Theresa tells Anne she can't just go and make up things like this, that it's not accurate, that it didn't happen that way, and besides, things have been left out. Anne has a great comeback: "(N)ow you're complaining about my sins of omission. A writer has to be able to leave out whatever she wants. Otherwise, we'd still be stuck on our morning pee" (p. 50). Leonardi is an author who knows what to include and what to leave out. The prose is lean, but feels lush; the stories spare, but are always enough.

AND THEN THEY WERE NUNS turns out to be a most amazing look at the lives of women outside the pale, women who are unusual, but also just like you and me. It is about the way, over time, they manage to weave a life together through all the ups and downs of their unusual existence and how they reconstitute when someone departs, leaving a crack in the community that must be repaired. The language, the cadence of the narratives, the humor, and the brokenness healed make Julian Pines a fictional place I wish I could visit. Highly recommended! ~Lori L. Lake, ...

Rating:
Summary: Julian Pines Abbey: Contemplation and Wit
Review: This is a book full of wit and understanding, an engrossing story that captures acts of eccentric kindness, gems of rooted wisdom, and is laced with heated sexuality (lesbians, DO NOT go directly to chapter 10) and humor. The reader follows the lives and relationships of the women of Julian Pines Abbey over a period of twenty-some years. Julian Pines is an alternative nunnery situated in the dry, California, Sierra Mountains, envisioned as a kind of supportive collective that eschews mindless regulations and sustains a nice sense of irreverence, while practicing, mostly, a life of seclusion, ecological innovations and, yep, vegetarianism.

Even if you never imagined becoming a nun, once you read this book, you well may. I grant you the nunnery is not everyone's idea of a place to "rock on;" but, in a way, this book is not about nunneries, though the Matins and Lauds are faithfully sung, a (woman) priest presides, an abbess councils, and prayers are invoked, this book is about the possible; it is about re-envisioning a meaningful life. It is about friendship, personal conflict, loss and the negotiation of quotidian matters. More simply, it is about the flesh and the spirit, thus making it, at the same time, about faith, psychology, philosophy and, even, the commodified world. That is a lot for a small book to pull off. Thankfully, these meaningful aspects of Leonardi's book are expressed in wonderful, frequently hilarious, tales, rather than rhetoric, or worse, political harangue.

Following a modernist's love of digression and alternative narrative patterns, Leonardi's writing continually challenges and awakens. Enjoy the unexpected. At one point, delightfully, even a murder mystery, involving opera divas (!), arises in San Francisco. The mystery is swiftly solved and dispensed with by the Sisters, without guns or fistfights.. And, then, there's letters, recipes, literary references. There's time warps, healing, mysticism. There is one cantankerous nun, who, fed up after over 20 years at Julian Pines, and anxious for "bacon, men and a reliable source of hot water," is so mercilessly mean that you just have to wonder how more complete a book could be. All the players are here. Probably everyone you have ever known is in this book. Too, all your feelings are mirrored. Though there are, of course, some affecting lesbian relationships "stirring," there is universality to the conundrums of these relationships that any reader will find familiar. Only their solutions are novel.

The chapter entitled "Anne's Sixty-five Good Reasons for Being a Nun at Julian Pines Abbey and one bad one" is nearly worth the price of the book. It is a response to a meeting in which all the wrong reasons for coming to a nunnery are discussed with Sharon, a visitor who is considering joining the nuns of Julian Pines. (The list follows a very funny and poignant series of letters Sharon writes to her husband, housesitter and friends as her stay at the Abbey stretches from days to weeks and on to months.) The list is a good measure of Leonardi's wit. It also gives us a look at her appreciation for the beauty of the simplest things. Most of us might be hard pressed to make a list of sixty-five good reasons to do ANYTHING. Through Leonardi, the reader discovers more ways to see "good reasons," because Leonardi is sensitive to the world and capable of relating its goodness and fun so ably.

In her final years as the Abbess, Beatrice, writes a series of frank and moving letters. In one of them, she responds to a snooty letter, from a conservative nun who has criticized Beatrice's abbey through the years, especially for allowing a "woman priest." In this letter to her adversary, Beatrice portrays the women of Julian Pines: "They are wonderful women, smart, warm, funny, thoughtful. You wouldn't like them. Sometimes they make noise, sometimes they cry, sometimes they fight, sometimes they kiss, sometimes they shout obscenities, sometimes they see visions. Messy women; they would annoy you, irritate you, exasperate you." This ironic description underlines Leonardi's central theme: goodness is only meaningful when one confronts the whole self, honestly. Her beings are worth knowing because they are made up of many parts---the virtuous, as well as the confused and faltering. By knowing these characters, I further appreciated the value of a messy world, and, at the same time, recognized the possibilities for goodness more deeply.

Leonardi's dialogue works well, too. This reader felt like she was in the middle of the room, eavesdropping. It is personal and I suppose you could call it revealing. By "revealing," I mean, honest. These women are trying to live truly honest lives. Not pious lives or saintly lives, nor righteous or prideful, but honest ones. Something tells me this is the harder life to live, because it is more complex and examined. And, though there may be a certain wish to turn away from a difficult dilemma, honestly expressed, there is always Leonardi's humor that brings the process full circle. We struggle WITH the characters, a refreshing experience after so many contrived action figures, TV sit-com jokesters, video-game characters, comic book movie heroes, ad nausea, have left me feeling occasionally stimulated, but always empty, and, never engaged on a personal level. The media world removes us further and further from sincere engagement. But, now I am getting political, something Leonardi so aptly skirts, while still nailing the issues. So read this book and save yourself from my inept sermonizing---or anyone else's, for that matter. If there is one thing that Leonardi is not, it is a sermonizer. She's purely contemplative.