Beginning
First, he was aware of light ― so white and sharp it seemed to come from everywhere, to be everywhere, above and below, cutting through him as a sunbeam cuts through a windowpane, and emanating from within, from the place where the physical substance that had once made him had once existed.
In Roswell, New Mexico, the mystery of the unknown grips a sheltered novitiate in a haunting historical novel about fate, faith, and agency. It’s 1947 when Sister Mary Agnes arrives in New Mexico. Her mission is to establish a monastery in the town of Roswell, where weeks before rumors of the crash landing of an unidentified craft have triggered a crisis of faith. Residents are drifting away from the divine, awed no longer by the heavens, but rather the stars.In service to the frightened and confused, Sister Mary Agnes soon befriends Betty Campbell, a teenager marked both physically and psychically by the inexplicable event. Mary Agnes is also drawn to Harvey, a handyman refurbishing the monastery ― and a firsthand witness to the crash. But as Mary Agnes tries to guide her wayward friends back to the church, it’s the fantastic and the forbidden that begin to loom large in her imagination.Thrown into her own crisis of doubt, Mary Agnes must choose whether to uphold the order in which she came of age or embrace the truth she feels in her heart, despite its terrifying complexity.
An online reviewer wrote: "Underneath the 'cover story' of UFO's, the book also deals with themes of fear, alienation, loss of faith in institutions, adolescence, and bullying."
Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts
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