{"id":3770,"date":"2025-08-07T15:31:05","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T15:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=3770"},"modified":"2025-08-07T15:31:05","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T15:31:05","slug":"book-review-an-umbrella-made-for-a-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=3770","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: An Umbrella Made for a Man"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An Umbrella Made for a Man<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

by Katherine Elberfeld<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong> Literary Fiction \/ Religious<\/p>\n

ISBN: <\/strong>9798891327153<\/p>\n

Print Length:<\/strong> 248 pages<\/p>\n

Publisher:<\/strong> Atmosphere Press<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Reviewed by Lauren Hayataka<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>She didn\u2019t lose her faith\u2014just her place in the room.<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Katherine Elberfeld\u2019s An Umbrella Made for a Man<\/em> is a tender, raw, and quietly furious excavation of one woman\u2019s spiritual calling\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t a culmination. It\u2019s the start of being dismissed in every way that matters. She\u2019s touched during interviews, spoken over in meetings, and left out of conversations entirely. Sometimes the sexism is overt\u2014a hand on her leg, a crude joke told at her expense. Other times, it\u2019s quieter: a glance that glides past her, a parishioner who turns away mid-sentence to speak to the male rector beside her. It\u2019s not that they say no. It\u2019s that they act as if she isn\u2019t there at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What defines An Umbrella Made for a Man<\/em> is its presence, one that oozes with ache for recognition. Elberfeld leans into the textures of Irene\u2019s life\u2014the rocking chairs that sway like invisible fingers across a porch, the smothering posture of a clergyman\u2019s legs splayed just inches too wide, the cool recognition that even clergy shirts are made for someone else\u2019s body.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

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Her loneliness is not incidental\u2014it is chronic. A twin that never formed, a dog taken from her, a friend\u2019s 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.<\/strong> Even in rooms full of colleagues, lovers, or parishioners, Irene\u2019s isolation is palpable. Elberfeld paints her loneliness not as melodrama, but as spiritual fact\u2014woven through the liturgy, the gender politics, and the institutional silence that leaves Irene gasping for air in her own vocation.<\/p>\n

This is a quiet story: one that simmers with sacred rage\u2014a woman\u2019s fury made holy through clarity and compassion. Irene\u2019s anger is not an outburst or spectacle. It is private, focused, and unrelenting. And it becomes the seed of something transformative. The novel doesn\u2019t ask what happens to women who get angry? It asks what could happen if we stopped telling them not to be? Irene\u2019s eventual creation of Welcome, Inc.\u2014a space for women who have endured sexual harassment in the workplace\u2014emerges not despite her rage, but because of it.<\/p>\n

Elberfeld refuses the trope of the hysterical woman or the sanitized survivor. Instead, she grants Irene\u2014and herself\u2014the 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\u2019s story to Elberfeld\u2019s own, the quiet hum beneath the novel becomes unmistakable: this is rooted in lived experience. In the author\u2019s own words, \u201cThey didn\u2019t know what to do with me in seminary.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

An Umbrella Made for a Man<\/em> 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Thank you for reading Lauren Hayataka\u2019s book review of An Umbrella Made for a Man <\/em>by Katherine Elberfeld! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.<\/p>\n

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The post Book Review: An Umbrella Made for a Man<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Umbrella Made for a Man by Katherine Elberfeld Genre: Literary Fiction \/ Religious ISBN: 9798891327153 Print Length: 248 pages Publisher: Atmosphere Press Amazon Bookshop Reviewed by Lauren Hayataka She didn\u2019t lose her faith\u2014just her place in the room. Katherine Elberfeld\u2019s An Umbrella Made for a Man is a tender, raw, and quietly furious excavation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}