Book Review: An Umbrella Made for a Man

Reviewed by Lauren Hayataka

She didn’t lose her faith—just her place in the room.

Katherine Elberfeld’s An Umbrella Made for a Man is a tender, raw, and quietly furious excavation of one woman’s spiritual calling—and the institutional and intimate betrayals that nearly silence it. With poetic precision and a fierce commitment to emotional truth, Elberfeld offers a story that feels less like fiction and more like revelation.

Set in the 1990s, the novel follows Irene Maxwell, a divorced mother of two boys, as she answers the call to become an Episcopal priest. But ordination, Irene soon realizes, isn’t a culmination. It’s the start of being dismissed in every way that matters. She’s touched during interviews, spoken over in meetings, and left out of conversations entirely. Sometimes the sexism is overt—a hand on her leg, a crude joke told at her expense. Other times, it’s quieter: a glance that glides past her, a parishioner who turns away mid-sentence to speak to the male rector beside her. It’s not that they say no. It’s that they act as if she isn’t there at all.

What defines An Umbrella Made for a Man is its presence, one that oozes with ache for recognition. Elberfeld leans into the textures of Irene’s life—the rocking chairs that sway like invisible fingers across a porch, the smothering posture of a clergyman’s legs splayed just inches too wide, the cool recognition that even clergy shirts are made for someone else’s body. The writing is lush, lyrical, and layered with unease as it drifts between the past and the present. Time is porous here; trauma echoes forward, longing stretches backward. And beneath it all simmers a single, persistent truth: Irene is utterly alone.

Her loneliness is not incidental—it is chronic. A twin that never formed, a dog taken from her, a friend’s hands she cannot feel in the dark. A family member who touched her under the watchful eyes of parents who did nothing and allowed everything. Even in rooms full of colleagues, lovers, or parishioners, Irene’s isolation is palpable. Elberfeld paints her loneliness not as melodrama, but as spiritual fact—woven through the liturgy, the gender politics, and the institutional silence that leaves Irene gasping for air in her own vocation.

This is a quiet story: one that simmers with sacred rage—a woman’s fury made holy through clarity and compassion. Irene’s anger is not an outburst or spectacle. It is private, focused, and unrelenting. And it becomes the seed of something transformative. The novel doesn’t ask what happens to women who get angry? It asks what could happen if we stopped telling them not to be? Irene’s eventual creation of Welcome, Inc.—a space for women who have endured sexual harassment in the workplace—emerges not despite her rage, but because of it.

Elberfeld refuses the trope of the hysterical woman or the sanitized survivor. Instead, she grants Irene—and herself—the full range of feeling: grief, longing, indignation, and tenderness. Even the structure of the novel reflects this complexity. And when the narrative shifts from Irene’s story to Elberfeld’s own, the quiet hum beneath the novel becomes unmistakable: this is rooted in lived experience. In the author’s own words, “They didn’t know what to do with me in seminary.”

An Umbrella Made for a Man is about the slow undoing of a world: a church that refuses to bend, a woman who refuses to break, and a system that never protected her to begin with. It is about silence and the cost of speaking. And it is about what remains when nothing else does: a woman who dares to say, I am still here.

Thank you for reading Lauren Hayataka’s book review of An Umbrella Made for a Man by Katherine Elberfeld! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

The post Book Review: An Umbrella Made for a Man appeared first on Independent Book Review.