Visions

Rating:
Summary: A Modern Bernadette's Visions
Review: Modern Conflict Amid Timeless Yearnings -- I felt readily included in the novel's main character's world and her adventures to seek the mystery of St. Bernadette. I loved it for its well written intelligent, conversation and reflections, as the characters grappled with modern conflicts amid timeless yearnings. It was a wonderful page turner.

Rating:
Summary: Modern Conflict Amid Timeless Yearnings
Review: Modern Conflict Amid Timeless Yearnings -- I felt readily included in the novel's main character's world and her adventures to seek the mystery of St. Bernadette. I loved it for its well written intelligent, conversation and reflections, as the characters grappled with modern conflicts amid timeless yearnings. It was a wonderful page turner.

Rating:
Summary: A Modern Bernadette's Visions
Review: This professional quality novel covers alot of territory without overwriting or over-reaching. Religon, politics, sex, mystery and friendship converge in the life of realisitically drawn middle-aged woman. Thankfully, Conrad eschews the tired theme of a woman this age experiencing a rebirth- in this novel, the revelations are the sum total of the character's experiences, rather than a repudiation of them. The setting, appropriately, is Lourdes, a catholic shrine that grew around the supernatural visions a young girl named Bernadette claimed to have experienced. Conrad's Bernadette visits Lourdes cynically, but finds it hard to separate reality from imagination in the charged atomosphere teeming with sick and wounded believers and mysterious catholic priests.

Conrad builds her character and plot thoughtfully and intelligently, and the action rarely lags. A quick read, but a substantial one.

Rating:
Summary: A Challenging and Unique Novel
Review: While staying as passionately political as in her first novel, N.E.W.S., Conrad now explores issues of the spirit. Perhaps the main character, Bernadette, reflects Conrad's own personal growth as she tries to come to terms with the recognition that life is more than politics and economic struggle. As important as meals, more important than Marx, people must have faith in order to survive. This is a challenging and unique novel that keep me anxiously turning the pages, hoping that Bernadette would find peace and the vision would be saved. (November, 2000)