the patron saint of liars by ann patchett

Son's story is no less affecting than that of St. She moves into his small caretaker's cottage he agrees to raise her daughter as his own. It is this birth - wonderfully described - that prompts Rose suddenly to marry Son, whom she does not love, and once more change her life. Elizabeth's, simply to have the hour-and-a-half ride to the hospital in which to see her babies before they are given away. She also becomes friend and confidante to a number of the girls at the home, among them Angie, her sweet and beautiful roommate, and Beatrice, a robust young woman who hides her labor from the nuns and delivers her twins right there at St.

Under Sister Evangeline's watchful eye and the love-stricken gaze of Son, the home's middle-aged handyman, Rose becomes a proficient cook. Sister Evangeline is a marvelous creation, a prescient old saint who can 'hear' the unborn babies the girls carry, accurately predicting their sex and their health and their lives to come.

Elizabeth's, the story moves along very well indeed.īecause it is early in her pregnancy, Rose is assigned to help out in the kitchen, where Sister Evangeline, the former Mother Superior, now an elderly, eccentric, delightful cook, reigns. Yet it seems a forgivable flaw when considered as a result of the author's desire to move her story along. Rose's motivation for this radical flight, and her utter success in so thoroughly separating herself from her former life, at times strain belief. If I gave up the thing I loved most in the world, then maybe God would respect my desperation.' 'I was doing a terrible thing, but I would pay the price. Nor does she tell her widowed and much-loved mother, whom she also abandons as a kind of penance for abandoning her marriage.

She is fleeing an ordinary marriage to a dull but loving young man whose devotion she had once misinterpreted as a sign from God. Into this world, in the 1960's, comes Rose Clinton, a young woman who has decided, en route from southern California, that 'I would be a liar for the rest of my life.' Rose is pregnant but not unwed, although at St. Patchett draws with wit and imagination - a realm where the waxing of each girl's pregnancy determines the shape of her days, from the hesitant flat-stomached arrival to the honored ninth-month place at the dining room's head table, to that moment when the water breaks or the contractions start and she disappears from St.

The patron saint of liars by ann patchett