A Little Nun-Sense
Choose fiction, a memoir or both! Either way these feisty, fun-loving nuns are definitely worth meeting!
Mercy House by Alena Dillon
Meet Sister Evelyn, a gruff, irreverent nun with the proverbial heart of gold. Sister Evelyn and other nuns run Mercy House, a place of refuge and renewal for abused women in Brooklyn. When her nemesis, Bishop Hawkins, begins his “nun-quisition” of Mercy House, Sister Evelyn knows she will have to act fast to shield the residents of Mercy House from a man determined to shut it down. Because Sister Evelyn and the other nuns act with their hearts and not in strict accordance with the teachings of the Catholic Church, they must be brave and resourceful as they challenge the authority of a most fallible man. Sister Evelyn is a character you won’t soon forget (and some the residents of Mercy House are pretty memorable, not to mention wildly inappropriate too!) in Dillon’s thought-provoking and funny debut novel Mercy House. by Karol Jackowski
In 1963 Karol “Suds” Jackowski was a fun-loving, hard-drinking high school girl. She had prayed earnestly that if a vocational “call” from Heaven to join the sisterhood ever came, the call would be for someone else (preferably a girl she didn’t like). Thus Karol, an indifferent scholar who reveled in the social hub of high school, was as surprised as anyone when she listened to the small voice inside her heart and joined the Sisters of the Holy Cross in South Bend, Indiana. Karol Ann Jackowski became Sister Mary Carol Joseph. She exchanged ratted hair for a cropped coif and headgear, friends and family for sisterhood and community, and fifths of vodka with high school buddies for happy hour at the convent (yes, really! – you won’t believe how much these sisters drink). Then came the sweeping changes of Vatican II. The life of solitude and sisterhood Karol had grown to love was totally transformed. Forever and Ever, Amen is a humorous, exuberant account (with lots of juicy tidbits about convent life) of Karol’s spiritual growth and struggles in becoming a nun during one of the most volatile periods in the history of Catholic sisterhood.
