Growing up a Catholic schoolgirl in 1970s Ontario, the nameless protagonist of Bondy\u2019s debut novel does just about everything that’s expected of her, from joining the choir to helping out the priest at the rectory with various tasks. The narrator knows she\u2019s no standout, and she likes it that way: \u201cI\u2019d always been quiet\u2026I wore quiet like a woolen shawl, protective and comforting.\u201d But it is perhaps this very lack of remarkableness that makes her a target for the pedophile priest\u2014\u201dFather Feeler\u201d\u2014at her parish. Years later, after she’s found her calling by opening up her home as a hospice for gay men dying of AIDS\u2014who were mistreated, or failed to be treated, at traditional hospitals and banned from seeing their partners or friends\u2014other victims of the priest begin to come forward. As the narrator weighs whether or not to join them in telling her story, she learns the insidious power that secrets have to fracture families and communities\u2014as well as how healing might be possible. In the novel\u2019s afterword, Bondy reveals the novel\u2019s inspiration as a real-life case out of Chatham, Ontario, and her desire to explore the lesser-known stories of female victims of church abuse. The necessity for home hospice networks for AIDS patients in the 1980s was also, sadly, very real. Bondy\u2019s decision to juxtapose the two scenarios gives the novel much of its power. But the nameless protagonist\u2014who sometimes shifts into the plural first person\u2014seems designed to be a kind of everywoman for victims and so never develops a vivid personhood of her own, undoing some of Bondy\u2019s intentions to move and outrage the reader through the power of fiction.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Growing up a Catholic schoolgirl in 1970s Ontario, the nameless protagonist of Bondy\u2019s debut novel does just about everything that’s expected of her, from joining the choir to helping out the priest at the rectory with various tasks. The narrator knows she\u2019s no standout, and she likes it that way: \u201cI\u2019d always been quiet\u2026I wore […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":774,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773"}],"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=773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}