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A review by rainbowfishy
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
4.5
this is a well done quarantine / lockdown novel - i’m still pretty adverse to reading novels with a COVID setting because i don’t want to think about it… but here, the references to lockdown are left as small details. it grounds us in this moment in time, while also serving as an enhancement to the isolation of the convent. and they really did feel so isolated! this book is primarily about forgiveness. why do we NEED it so badly? what lengths will we go through to forgive someone, to forgive ourselves? wrestling with these questions, and her own grief, feels of spiritual importance to the narrator.
it’s very interesting to me that she freely admits that she’s not religious. she never even technically “joins” the convent. she thinks less of the nuns for their christian devotion and gets annoyed by their professions of love for Jesus… and yet here she is! this is fascinating to me because why do I have the urge to do something similar? why is it common for girls to feel compelled towards nuns? i’m not religious, unlike this narrator i didn’t even grow up religious, and yet the idea of nunnery is fascinating to me. maybe it’s because when i hear / read about the quietude of it, the level of devoted introspection required, i think i could do it?
one part that got me thinking was when one of the nuns said that prayer is not about praying, it’s about interrupting your thought patterns… redirecting your human compulsions into something else. there’s a meditative trance quality to some of the moments here. and there are so many other moments that made me go hmm - why don’t they ever just call an exterminator for the sheer amount of rats? why do the rats largely leave the room with the bones alone? ALSO i was so interested in the narrator’s realization that staying isolated and “doing nothing” was far better for the environment than her ecological advocacy work… she thinks that her actively working to protect the environment (emailing, traveling, organizing) was more or less futile because pollution and destruction is still ongoing… whereas living in this isolated convent is a much lower carbon footprint than even trying… this is such an interesting thought! if we care about the environment, are we all supposed to do nothing? again this leads back into this being a well done lockdown novel… because i feel like most people had similar thoughts in isolation, as we redefined what our relationships to work are, meanwhile rivers were getting cleaner and plants were grown back because the level of human activity had decreased so much.
clearly this book made me think a lot - i wish i could say that it’s a favorite, but ultimately i feel like it could’ve been slightly shorter… some of the narrator’s anecdotes about families that she knew growing up felt like they dragged… if only this had been like 75 pages less!!
it’s very interesting to me that she freely admits that she’s not religious. she never even technically “joins” the convent. she thinks less of the nuns for their christian devotion and gets annoyed by their professions of love for Jesus… and yet here she is! this is fascinating to me because why do I have the urge to do something similar? why is it common for girls to feel compelled towards nuns? i’m not religious, unlike this narrator i didn’t even grow up religious, and yet the idea of nunnery is fascinating to me. maybe it’s because when i hear / read about the quietude of it, the level of devoted introspection required, i think i could do it?
one part that got me thinking was when one of the nuns said that prayer is not about praying, it’s about interrupting your thought patterns… redirecting your human compulsions into something else. there’s a meditative trance quality to some of the moments here. and there are so many other moments that made me go hmm - why don’t they ever just call an exterminator for the sheer amount of rats? why do the rats largely leave the room with the bones alone? ALSO i was so interested in the narrator’s realization that staying isolated and “doing nothing” was far better for the environment than her ecological advocacy work… she thinks that her actively working to protect the environment (emailing, traveling, organizing) was more or less futile because pollution and destruction is still ongoing… whereas living in this isolated convent is a much lower carbon footprint than even trying… this is such an interesting thought! if we care about the environment, are we all supposed to do nothing? again this leads back into this being a well done lockdown novel… because i feel like most people had similar thoughts in isolation, as we redefined what our relationships to work are, meanwhile rivers were getting cleaner and plants were grown back because the level of human activity had decreased so much.
clearly this book made me think a lot - i wish i could say that it’s a favorite, but ultimately i feel like it could’ve been slightly shorter… some of the narrator’s anecdotes about families that she knew growing up felt like they dragged… if only this had been like 75 pages less!!