Play Book Tag discussion

Agatha of Little Neon is a debut novel by a promising young author. The story started out slow for me, but the writing was often engaging, and I knew (or hoped) it wouldn’t be a predictable story. Aside from good reviews, I was partly interested in this book because it has a local setting, I know a catholic sister from graduate school (she shared a lot), and I read another book recently that sparked an interest in how the church handled the sex abuse cases. All these things kept me listening while I was waiting for the story itself to grab a hold of me, which it did. By the end, I didn't want the story to end. I wanted to know more about Agatha's life.

The book provides a picture of the day to day lives of 4 Catholic sisters (nuns) around 2004. The story begins when they are running a day care center in Lackawanna NY. It no longer has any customers, and the local Diocese is nearly bankrupt, so they will need to find another placement. An opportunity arises to run a half-way house for addicts in Rhode Island, called Little Neon. Agatha is also asked to teach Geometry at the Catholic high school to fill a last-minute vacancy. (This plot turn seemed unlikely to me since Agatha doesn't have a college degree or any relevant experience. She also has a fear of speaking, and she hates to be the center of attention. Nonetheless, she gets the textbook, learns the material, and does the job.)

The teaching job forces Agatha to develop new skills, and she turns out to be an interesting character. I enjoyed it when Agatha begins to see, think and do things on her own. She isn't as rigid as her fellow sisters, who all shut (or cover) their ears when anyone speaks about the church scandal. My favorite resident of the house is Tim Gary, a kind but lonely man who lost part of his face to cancer. He's the emotional center in the book I think. The other sisters didn't stand out (to me) as individual characters but they initiated a number of activities that were somewhat interesting. I also liked Nadia (a teacher), Mother Roberta, and Lawnmower Jill.

Note, the book has LGBT-queer related tags, and a few of us were wondering why. The book doesn't have a strong LGBT theme, but there is an event in the book, and additional background information that might cause people to use the tags.

Great review, Nancy! My thoughts about the book are similar to yours. The book became more interesting in the last third of it when Agatha began to question her life choices. Working in the school opened up Agatha's thinking and led her to examine other possibilities. For me too, Agatha and Tim Gary were the most developed characters in the book. I also liked the other characters you mentioned.

I always find it interesting to see other people's reviews of books I've read. In case you want to see mine, here it is. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Thanks, I keep thinking about this book and I will want to see what else she does. I think the author did a good job in showing the data that Agatha was seeing about the abusive priests. Your figure is even more shocking.

I agree that the sisters were really not qualified to run this halfway house. I think these facilities are often run by former addicts (they would say "recovering" not "former") who aren't as easy to fool. I was told by a sister that without an education, nuns were not allowed to do much more than menial work.

I hope the author is working on a new book. I'll definitely want to read her next one.

As a social worker in a large hospital, I was often thrown into working with patient populations that I had no specialized training for. Such was the case when I was expected to work with pregnant heroin addicts. They were street smart and I was a bit like Agatha. ;0)