Nuns hold an irresistible fascination.
Whitney gets too muddled in her own tangents at times, but the slow dawning of her own change of heart is a gently affecting thing to behold. Whitney charts the women's histories from their earliest inklings of a vocation through either their continued service, working with the Northwest's neediest, or the relinquishment of their vows. Whitney is candid in detailing her own complicated relationship with both Catholicism and the women who instilled its tenets in her, but her thought process is too raw and convoluted on the page. She zigzags from her own history to that of the convent to those of the nuns in a manner that can only be described as slapdash. She freely talks about her agent and her editor, but their presences would have been far better appreciated if they'd been seen less and felt more.