Sister Agatha roller-skates away from the church

As Catholic religious sisters dwindle in numbers, age into old folks’ homes, and sell off their mother houses and hospitals, younger sisters increasingly have to find new ways to live out their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience without the accompaniment of their peers. In Claire Luchette’s debut novel, four young sisters must make a new life for themselves when the day care they’ve been running closes its doors and their elderly superior retires. Instead of caring for babies, praying in their idyllic cathedral, and marketing small-batch mustards and aiolis, they’ve been called to care for recovering addicts and felons as the staff of Little Neon, a halfway house painted discount chartreuse in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where the rusted water tower is about as idyllic as it gets.

Fiction about religious sisters tends toward the sentimental or the horrific, and Luchette’s Sister Agatha alludes to this convention when she remarks that nuns are either naive, charming, and jolly or “wicked, frustrated, sexually repressed.” Luchette deftly avoids the clichés of the genre, giving us instead flawed and frustrating but relatable characters—sisters and convicted felons alike.

In the early chapters, Luchette’s sisters move beautifully as one: “We were fixed to one another, like parts of some strange, asymmetrical body: Frances was the mouth; Mary Lucille, the heart; Therese, the legs. And I, Agatha, the eyes.” They menstruate at the same time. But as we read on, we begin to suspect, as she does, that Agatha chose being part of a larger body to avoid being herself.