A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun

Rating:
Summary: Interesting - one nun's life in Mexico some 300 years ago
Review: Madre Maria de San Jose was a relatively uneducated women who spent 21 years waiting to enter a convent. She wrote of her family and convent life at the request of her confessors, and gives us a close look at what life in Mexico during the late 1600s and early 1700s was like for her. These are not the translations of her complete journals - there were 12 volumes - but, rather, selections from her writings. The selections give the reader a panoramic view of Madre Maria's life. The journal entries can be a bit slow-going at times, mostly because of the writing style that Maria used. And the writing style would seem to be typical for many who wrote these types of journals. I found the section "Studies of Maria de San Jose's Life and Text" to be much easier to read, and somewhat more interesting. This section gives us more historical information about her life, her family, and what convent life was like at the time that Madre Maria lived.