Summary

Sonia is a Hungarian immigrant who is raising her daughter, Mila—her beloved Milosh—on her own in sunny Los Angeles. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, dodging PTA moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum—minor mistakes that nevertheless continually remind her of everything she doesn't understand about America and parenthood. Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school with the help of a less-than-helpful guidebook on how to be cool in the sixth grade—all the while trying to get her secretive mother to share something, anything, about her past.

Sonia is sure that their bond, stitched from drive-through dinners, extracurricular activities, and a lot of exasperated affection for each other—will be enough to satisfy her daughter. But her guarded lifestyle has left Mila lonely, isolated, and ready to write herself into a bigger story. When she stumbles across emails between her mother and a man she's never met, Mila decides to take matters into her own hands and forms a plan that will implode their carefully constructed lives.

Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall; Washington, DC, in the tense years of the Cold War; and the bright sunshine of early aughts Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, secrecy and loneliness, belonging and reinvention—and what happens when the truth can't be held back any longer.

BookBrowse Review

Fran Fabriczki's debut novel, Porcupines, is a dual-timeline story set between 2001 and the 1980s. In the later timeline, in Los Angeles, Sonia is a single mother to her ten-year-old daughter, Mila. Sonia and Mila have a close relationship, as their circle consists primarily of the two of them, but Mila has been harboring curiosity about who her father is, which conflicts with her mother's rule of revealing as little information as possible to everyone, including her daughter. "There are not many rules between Sonia and Mila in their household of two. However, Mila knows there are a few questions it is best not to ask her mother." One of the most important questions for Mila to avoid is that of her paternity. So Mila uses an upcoming school trip to San Francisco to corner her mother into chaperoning and creates a plan to meet the man she believes is her father. This sets in motion a chain of events that forces Sonia to question if the way she has been living is truly best for her and her daughter. Porcupines takes us across the globe, from California to Budapest, spanning two decades as we uncover Sonia's upbringing as the daughter of a Hungarian diplomat, the reality of immigration, tense family relationships, the desire and search for identity, and the pursuit of a better life in America.

"For all their shared DNA and all of their time spent soaking up each other's habits, there is a fundamental difference between mother and daughter: Sonia is alive to the joys of life, perhaps naturally inclined to indulge in them too much, and is forever repressing her exuberance to suit her circumstances; Mila views what little of the world she's seen with scepticism and her own place in it with uncertainty."

One of the novel's central frameworks consists of the ways mother and daughter differ, which can be attributed to their identities: Sonia as an immigrant and Mila as a born American. Sonia is used to hardship and doesn't take her life and opportunities for granted. Much of her current existence is structured around being a caretaker. She must navigate her daughter's school system (avoiding the PTA moms), the unfamiliar rituals of a birthday party, and ongoing silence with her older sister and father. "I take my kicks where I can get them. My whole life is serious; I don't need to pretend like I have problems." Meanwhile, Mila is a serious young girl who struggles to find her place and lacks knowledge about her identity. She resorts to an advice book written by a fellow fifth grader for other girls on how to stand out and make friends in school: "How to Be Cool in the Sixth Grade: Thirty Cool Rules to Rule the School."

Mila's mother has never introduced her to her aunt, who also lives in Los Angeles; has never revealed who her father is; has never disclosed that she has a green-card marriage; and avoids talking about her Hungarian heritage. Cycles repeat as Sonia's handling of information with Mila mirrors her understanding of how others in her family communicate. The decision by Sonia and her parents not to talk about their past and bad memories may be a way to avoid passing on intergenerational trauma and a coping mechanism for surviving their current lives. But the things you avoid end up finding their way back to the center spotlight.

"They also did not talk about the first six years of Mr. Imre's life…They didn't talk about his first memory—of being locked inside a synagogue in the ghetto…They did not talk about Mrs. Imre's mother…Or Mrs. Imre's father, who found his prewar family and fled to the West to rejoin them shortly after. They certainly didn't talk about how it felt to grow up in the lonely aftermath of it all or just how primed they were to be part of something bigger but just how ill-equipped they were for family building."

In the timeline set in 2001, where Mila convinces Sonia to chaperone her fifth-grade orchestra, she is inspired by the movies Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally. The other timeline takes us back into Sonia's experiences as the daughter of a Hungarian diplomat (see Beyond the Book), showing how her life in America began as she traveled from Hungary at eighteen to visit her older sister, Rina, in Los Angeles. And as the story evolves, we see how Mila's plan forces Sonia to confront the two aspects of her life she has been avoiding: speaking about her family, heritage, and origins in America and facing the reality of how her secrecy has affected Mila.

The plot is set up for a bigger reckoning than what actually happens, which leaves the ending a bit unsatisfying. The driving action in the 2001 storyline is Mila's attempt to learn who her father is. We get some answers, and the ending signals a decision, but it doesn't feel as cathartic or have as much payoff as the reader might expect for a story grounded in family. There is a decent amount of reference to the historical significance of Sonia's upbringing, especially given her father's career as a diplomat, but much remains unclear, as the deeper context of Hungary in relation to the Berlin Wall is not explored. More introspection from Sonia would have made the book more impactful. Also, the flips between the dual timelines and jumps in location make the storyline difficult to follow.

Still, the story's premise is charming, and Sonia's humor and voice are enjoyable. Porcupines is ideal for those who enjoy immigrant family stories with strong female characters who are witty and whose flaws are integral to the narrative. It's an adventure that takes readers across the globe during a transformative period while touching on the experiences of Hungarian Jews, the impacts of immigration on families, how to reckon with the decisions of the past, and making amends with one's family.

Book reviewed by Letitia Asare

Beyond the Book:
The Life of a Hungarian Diplomat in the 1980s

In Fran Fabriczki's debut novel Porcupines, Sonia's father is a retired diplomat. His job deeply influenced her family's lifestyle, as they divided their time between their home country, Hungary, and the United States, specifically Washington, DC, where he was posted. Part of the story takes place during the 1980s in Budapest, the capital and largest city of Hungary, and part of it in America before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall—an event Hungary helped set in motion. While Porcupines doesn't delve deeply into the political and historical details of this time, Sonia's father's job is relevant to understanding the anxieties, hopes, and secrecy the characters have experienced. The book offers a glimpse into the life of a diplomat during a pivotal period linked to the Cold War's end.

The Role of a Hungarian Diplomat in the 1980s

As a diplomat, Mr. Imre, Sonia's father, would have been a part of Hungary's embassy representing Hungary to the government of the United States. A diplomat's responsibilities during this time would have included reporting on US politics, especially attitudes toward Eastern Europe; meeting US officials; promoting Hungarian interests; and translating Hungary's evolving policies for American audiences.

Diplomatic Life in Socialist Hungary

"Sonia's father was a retired diplomat, something she would eventually learn not to mention to new acquaintances—it created some confusion. The word diplomat arouses ideas of a glamorous cosmopolitanism in the minds of people outside the Eastern Bloc, and no amount of insistence that a diplomat in socialist Hungary could be an ordinary government position, underpaid and tedious like any other, will disabuse them of the notion."

A diplomat from socialist Hungary in the 1980s would have earned a modest salary set by the state. As we see in the novel, Sonia's father's career was not financially transformative; she still had to work as a teenager to get by, which contrasted with the image her classmates had of her.

Family life for a diplomat in her father's position would have been most notable in its experiences. In the novel, when Sonia's father gets a posting in America and the family relocates to Washington, DC, they live in diplomatic residences. Diplomats' families almost always live in housing arranged or approved by the embassy. This can create the illusion of privilege without actual accumulation of wealth, which Sonia notes in the book.

"It was true that the Imre children were rich in education and experience, having lived in five different countries within fifteen years, but it was also true that when they returned home to Budapest, the money saved from a government salary over these years amounted only to a small deposit in a two-bed flat in the suburbs."

Reticence as a Diplomatic Skill

Sonia's father's temperament reflects qualities that are often essential for diplomats. "Mr. Imre had the diplomat's habit of reticence; he would rarely voice his grievances." Diplomats learn early on that speaking out of turn can have serious repercussions, so they are trained to develop reticence as a key skill. Instead of reacting emotionally, they adopt habits like using neutral, carefully crafted language and refraining from sharing personal opinions. Over time, these habits may become second nature because they are vital for professional survival, especially in a system like Hungary's during the period in the book. Political expression was sensitive; careers depended on perceived loyalty, and even private remarks could pose risks.

In Porcupines, Mr. Imre's role as a diplomat is defined not by glamour or wealth but by restraint and duty. The novel uses Mr. Imre's profession to reveal a broader truth about Hungary in the 1980s: that beneath the appearance of international mobility and status was a world governed by limitations and surveillance. Through this perspective, Porcupines depicts not just one family's personal life but also the societal tensions during a time of profound change.

Budapest, Hungary (1980), by Sandor Somkuti, CC BY-SA 2.0

Summary

People, plants and animals all depend on the natural night—both its darkness and its starlight—for so much, from regulating our sleep cycles to providing the inspiration for myths and legends across the millennia. But darkness is disappearing, and with it, our view of the stars. The constant glow of streetlights, of headlights streaming down highways, and wasteful glare from skyscrapers left shining all night have created so much light pollution that the majority of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way or experience the restful embrace of a natural night. As the dark becomes ever more elusive, it is a critical moment to stop, look up, and consider what we lose with the disappearing stars.

In Nightfaring, Megan Eaves-Egenes travels around the world to better understand our deep connection to the dark. Finding solace in the stars at a time of difficulty in her own life, she embarks on a journey from New Zealand to Uzbekistan, Italy to Japan, Germany to the Himalaya, exploring the many ways that humans have depended on, feared, and mythologized darkness.

Blending travel and nature writing with history and self-discovery, Megan writes of how the stars have helped her chart the course of her own life—just as they've guided humankind for as long as we've slept beneath them.

BookBrowse Review

If you go out at night and look up at the sky, what do you see? It depends on where you are, but if you're like most people, you may not see very much. In the cities and the suburbs, the glow of streetlights, buildings, and other sources of illumination rise upwards, rendering the stars ancient sailors used to navigate all but invisible in their glare. There are places, especially in rural areas, where you can see the full splendor of the Milky Way in the night sky, but these are rarer than they used to be, and they grow more rare by the day.

Megan Eaves-Egenes, a travel writer known for her work on Lonely Planet, has dedicated herself to the preservation of the night sky. In Nightfaring, she journeys from location to location—a small English village with no streetlights, a hill in Uzbekistan where a medieval astronomer plied his trade, a health resort in Japan with a focus on the benefits of darkness—to take in the majesty of the night while also highlighting how thoroughly modern society has pushed it to the margins. Along the way, she weaves in autobiographical details about her childhood in rural New Mexico, her struggles during the Covid-19 lockdown, and a love affair with a fellow dark sky enthusiast in Argentina.

Nightfaring is at its best highlighting corners of the globe you may not have known about, pockets of resistance to encroaching modernity. Take, for instance, Dennis Severs' House, a museum/art piece in London that transports visitors back in time to a pre-electricity home—the space is designed "to evoke the feeling as you enter each room that a member of the family had left moments before." This is effectively contrasted with the rest of London, which Eaves-Egenes positions as a sort of ground zero for bright, unnatural modernity: it was one of the first cities to be illuminated at night, first by torches and then by gas and electric lights, which today are a "relentless, inexhaustible flood."

Or consider a visit to Ireland, where Eaves-Egenes' longing for the night sky dovetails with remembrances of other things that were once present in this location but are no longer, such as the Southern Cross (a constellation now exclusively visible in the Southern Hemisphere); an ancient friary once used as a home base for a figure from Irish folklore, the pirate Grace O'Malley, aka Granuaile; and tales of the banshee, a wailing woman spirit from Irish mythology associated with darkness.

Eaves-Egenes wisely keeps most of her focus on the night sky and the ways of life surrounding it. The autobiographical elements, as important as they undoubtedly are to the author, aren't quite as interesting. Her prose, while functional, doesn't do enough to make these segments feel like more than asides. But the meat of the book is so interesting that it's easy to forgive. If you live in a place with lots of light pollution (as I do), this will make you want to travel somewhere quiet and look up.

Book reviewed by Joe Hoeffner

Beyond the Book:
The Bortle Scale

While Megan Eaves-Egenes travels the world in search of the night sky in Nightfaring, the encroaching threat of light pollution looms over the proceedings. It's hard for it not to: as she explains in the first chapter, the light from LEDs can travel "30 to 40 kilometers (about 20 to 25 miles)," while "the cumulative skyglow from a big city…can sometimes be seen 200 kilometers (125 miles) away." But when you're talking about something like an omnipresent skyglow, it can be useful to know exactly what it is you're dealing with. Luckily, we have the Bortle scale to help us determine precise levels of light pollution. Astronomers use the scale to measure sky brightness, set realistic expectations for what can be seen at a given site, and communicate sky quality clearly across different observing locations.

The Bortle scale was developed by an amateur astronomer by the name of John E. Bortle, and was first published in 2001 by Sky & Telescope magazine. The scale measures light pollution, ranging from 1 (least polluted) to 9 (most polluted); although Bortle's focus as an astronomer was generally on comets, it's become widely used across the amateur astronomy community (as well as by anyone who appreciates the night sky) to communicate sky conditions.

The top of the scale, Class 9, is used to denote the skies one might see in the inner city: most of the constellations are blocked out by skyglow, with only a few large, close objects (the moon and some of the planets) truly visible without aid. Going down the scale, visibility gradually improves. In a bright suburban sky (Class 6), traces of the Milky Way are visible, if only at the zenith (or the very top of the sky); in the rural/suburban transition zone (Class 4), the zodiacal light, or diffused sunlight, is visible, if weakened.

Eventually, you get all the way down to glorious Class 1, which you'll find only in very rural areas. This is where the full beauty of the night sky is apparent, furthest away from the light pollution of civilization. The spiral Triangulum galaxy, or M33, is readily visible; you may see the sky glow with zodiacal light, and the stars glimmer and twinkle before you.

Illustration of the Bortle scale by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0

Summary

One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He's carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.

In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family's catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne's illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.

What really happened to Louisa's father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there's so much we can't see?

BookBrowse Review

In Susan Choi's Flashlight, ten-year-old Louisa, the daughter of a Japanese-born Korean man and a white woman from the American Midwest, is found unconscious on a beach in Japan—her father, who was walking with her through the dark, flashlight in hand, is soon presumed drowned. That's the end of the story as far as anyone seems concerned. But this event, with its unknowns, reverberates forward, through the lives of Louisa and her mother Anne, both perceptibly and imperceptibly, linked to the past in ways they can't imagine.

Choi's novel is about the general impact of family secrets and trauma, and also specifically about Korean history and Korean culture loss (see Beyond the Book). Louisa's father, referred to in flashbacks to his childhood in Japan as Seok—alternated with Hiroshi, the Japanese name given to him during the occupation—and later as Serk starting with his time in the United States, never speaks of his Korean family to his American one, because his parents and siblings, save for a sister still in Japan he keeps in sporadic contact with, voluntarily relocated to North Korea. Their fates are uncertain, and Serk, without American citizenship, doesn't want to risk his residence by betraying ties to the DPRK. His assimilation into first Japanese and then American society, his silence, the languages he speaks and doesn't speak—these aren't accidents or choices, they're cultural erasure, colonialism and imperialism at work.

Despite its premise, Flashlight is less suspense-driven than a reader might expect, and more closely resembles straightforward literary fiction than Choi's National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise (2019). But it's a big swing with bold implications. Choi is relentless in her depiction of the necessarily violent consequences of borders, not just when it comes to the more obvious examples, like the complicity of global powers in North Koreans' isolation, but in less expected ways, such as when Louisa, traveling through Europe during college, runs into a barrage of bad luck and bureaucracy that affects the trajectory of her future. This violence is contrasted with the mundanity of life lived for long stretches without the direct interference of governments, militaries, and force, and realistic portrayals of how easy it can be to ignore the invisible atmosphere of assumptions we breathe, political and otherwise. Choi's descriptions of the fallibility of the human mind and memory are luminous:

"These are not the events Louisa recalls because she has never recalled them, they live nowhere in memory. If she was somehow aware of these events that she isn't aware of, she might wonder if the events, housed nowhere in her memory, buried in some unremembering stratum of her body or perhaps expelled like noxious vapors into the impersonal air, can even be said to have happened. … The story of her father's death by drowning is one she somehow both authored and received passively. It emerged in response to a logic and it equally dictated logic."

The book's more than four hundred pages hold many detours and deep dives into characters' individual stories. Flashlight amply displays Choi's stellar writing through a variety of moods and subjects, though it lacks a dynamism that could have been achieved through greater intentionality. The plot is also somewhat predictable, but destabilizingly refreshing in the precise manner of its unfolding, invigorating in its combination of drama and matter-of-factness. The seemingly central mystery is revealed, with little fanfare, in the second half, and the suspense subsequently flows into anticipation of the future. This switching of streams reflects how cultural and historical losses run below the surface of families and nations, below the normalizing, distracting narratives attached to them. We follow the story waiting to discover what happened to Serk, thinking of both the obvious and less obvious answers, waiting for a clever or unexpected turn, only to find that maybe we knew what happened to him all along and the real question has been what will happen now.

It's easy to read Choi's writing of Serk as heavyhanded, and some readers will probably feel the specifics of his life and fate are a bit much. It can appear like this unfortunate man carries all the weight of the Japanese occupation and the Korean War on his back, like he is an unlucky vessel filled with history, a human microcosm of a stolen and broken land. But even if he exemplifies this history, he is also a victim and actor in it, someone who has had intimate contact with it, not a metaphor or an analogy but a part of the whole, and luck may have less to do with everything than one might think. And after all, what is a realistic life? What does it mean to have lived one that seems unrealistic to others? Whose story is believed or not, and why?

If Choi's novel is about the violence and rigidity of borders, how they enforce one story as multiple stories teem around them, it's also about how rigid lines might blur and fade into one another, how borders and barriers become mutable when they encounter elements that can never be fully controlled—water, air, language. Flashlight will appeal to book clubs for discussion and to readers who like big, sprawling works of literary and historical fiction that weave global events with personal minutiae. It is mercilessly sad and dramatic, but in the way of tragedies that satisfy with the breadth of their emotion and stories that pull all their threads together at the last minute for a happy ending of sorts. It offers a world to get lost in and a deep historical consciousness.

Book reviewed by Elisabeth Cook

Beyond the Book:
Korean Language Loss Under Japanese Colonialism and Beyond

In Susan Choi's Flashlight, main character Seok, later referred to as Serk, spends his childhood with his Korean family in Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea. He attends a Japanese school, where he speaks and learns to write Japanese. He believes he is Japanese until the occupation ends, leading to a humorous and emotionally brutal exchange with his family that is illustrative of what Korean people, at home and abroad, lost during this period of enforced Japanese language and schooling:

"But what's Korea?" he asked as they turned to walk home.
"Let me die," Auntie Kim said.
"Korea is the homeland of Koreans," his mother told him.
"But what are Koreans?"
"We are," said his mother. "You are. That's why your name isn't really Hiroshi, it's 석."
"What do you mean my name isn't Hiroshi?" he cried.
"I told you," Auntie Kim said to his mother again.
His mother replied, "But what choice did we have?"

During Japan's occupation of Korea (1910-1945), Japan assumed military control of the Korean peninsula and its institutions, including schools, and used education as a means of assimilating Koreans to Japanese language and culture. Widespread displacement and enforced immigration also resulted in many Koreans, like Seok's family on Jeju Island, being relocated to Japan. While the war waged on Korean life and identity was wide-ranging, the attempted erasure of the Korean language, including the suppression of hangul, the Korean writing system, was arguably one of the most significant elements. And although the occupation ended in 1945, Korean people who grew up or lived during Japanese rule continued to experience profound effects of this language loss that in some cases still impact later generations.

As a child, Seok understands Korean from hearing his parents speak it, but he rarely speaks it himself and has never learned the written language. Later, after moving to the United States and marrying an American woman, he spends time with a Korean colleague, Tom. Serk's wife, Anne, portrays her husband's attitude towards the language in a letter to a friend: "Serk even claims, at times, that he CAN'T speak Korean—he and Tom quarreled about this—in Korean, I can only assume!" Later, when Serk's adult daughter Louisa is learning to speak Korean, she thinks of it as "the language her father apparently discarded to the back of his linguistic closet before she was ever his child, a language he possessed in its totality and never bothered to use."

Fluency and degrees of fluency in a language can be nuanced even when one's relationship to it isn't complicated by personal and emotional factors, and Serk's downplaying of his Korean background in general has been bound up with not wanting to endanger his residence in the US by calling attention to his family's ties with North Korea. In this way, the suppression of the Korean language, for Serk, continues long after the Japanese occupation for reasons related to global interests and geopolitical power, even as those around him remain unaware of this.

In Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, an account of Korean military brides in America, Ji-Yeon Yuh addresses the effects language and power had on women who lived through the Japanese colonial period and later moved to the US, many of whom made life choices in precarious situations. Learning first Japanese and then English was essential to their economic prospects during the periods of respective dominance of Japan and America. They had also been discouraged from speaking Korean or never fully learned it, leaving them to struggle with the language later on:

"Foreign domination had literally left these women with no language to call their own. Far from being a liberating, transnational, and multicultural experience that allowed them to cross borders at will and revel in the interplay of multiple tongues, their contacts with multiple languages had been painful, frustrating, and even humiliating."

Both Serk's situation and that of the military brides call attention to the varied, complicated, and sometimes permanent ways that the Japanese occupation (along with subsequent American military presence in South Korea) changed many Korean people's relationship to their language, and how it has presented obstacles to speakers in the Korean diaspora passing the language on to their descendants.

Replica of Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye, the book in which the creation of hangul is explained, at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, photo by Kbarends

Summary

It's the 1960s, and David is handsome, charismatic, and sworn to celibacy. An exemplary Catholic priest, devotion to God is all he's ever known, and all he ever thinks he will. In London, Margaret is adrift, healing from the loss of her parents and the end of a recent love affair. Increasingly drawn to the church, she sets out to join the new revolutions of sex and faith, taking up a teaching position at an all-girls school in David's diocese.

Decades later, Margaret is being cared for by her grandson, who has just discovered the strange truth of his family history. So begins the story of forbidden love and ardent faith, devotion and sacrifice, as the consequences of David and Margaret's unlikely union play out across generations. A first novel from an award-winning poet, A Private Man traces the exquisite love of two brilliant characters caught between passion and piety as they seek to usher the church they cherish into a more progressive era.

BookBrowse Review

It is 1963 when Margaret Bendelow is hired to teach theology at a women's college in England. Her cognitive skill and understanding of theological complexities are exemplary. Her academic depth is noteworthy. At the beginning of her career, the future seems too far away to contemplate—she'll be awash in dementia in 2019. The present is where she thrives. Margaret is excited about her appointment until she finds out she will be under the supervision of someone named Father Fletcher. She resents having to prove her credibility when she has studied at Regina Mundi, a college that teaches laywomen theology.

The shaping of Margaret as a woman of wit and lofty dreams, of desires and frustrations, is the complicated task Stephanie Sy-Quia eagerly takes on, inspired by her grandparents' forbidden love story. Her first novel A Private Man builds its beautiful arc with both refined prose and character depth. Sy-Quia illustrates how Margaret is exhausted by the Catholic Church as a patriarchal institution, how it romanticizes devotion and prayer but diminishes service by women and female leadership; that's what she can't tolerate despite living her faith. After she arrives at the women's college she registers for the birth control pill, despite the doctor's bold stare at her empty ring finger, his eyes rebuking her as if she has already sinned, but Margaret refuses to be shamed about liking sex. The pill is social freedom.

The man overseeing her class, David Fletcher, is attractive and young, she guesses around forty years old. She has always been suspicious of attractive men but he has calluses on his hands that seem to imply he is familiar with physical labor.

David has been a priest for over a decade. For such a young man, his eyes are weary, though his strong voice carries easily in the wind. Beneath those marks of masculinity on his hands is a quiet loneliness, years in the making, from the war, and what he saw there, and from the sacrifices of the priesthood. Mostly, he trusts the company of men, assuming what he is feeling inside of himself is inside of them too, this unexplainable longing for the unknown and the road not taken.

On Margaret's first class day, David sits in the very back. She is a little late, her hair in a tidy bun, and the first thing she does is insist the students not stand when she enters the room. She advises them to call her Margaret and not Miss Bendelow.

"I am here to teach you theology. You do not know how lucky you are…Together we have the opportunity to study moral theology, dogmatics and the liturgy!... I have just come from Rome and let me tell you there is a revolution afoot."

"Father Fletcher and I will be meeting over the next few days," Margaret tells the students, "but the aim is to turn you out as thinking Catholics by the end of it."

If Margaret is surprised by her attraction to David, and his fascination with her, she doesn't let it dissuade her from her role as professor. But outside of class she and David are charmed by their Catholic differences.

Margaret converted to Catholicism during a terrible time—her mother died, her married lover, a man named Tristan, excitedly announced his wife was pregnant. Catholicism was the family religion of her best friend Nicole. Converting was an informed choice. She liked the order of Catholic rituals, their structure. Advent. Lent. Easter. The money Margaret inherited from her parents allowed her freedom to pursue her interests in Rome.

For David, Catholicism "was in him like marrow, he had drawn it all up, into all the coursing paths of his self." It "could never be rooted out." David has given everything up in his service to God and Margaret has given nothing up in her analytical devotion to God. Their burgeoning friendship can't expunge the gap between what being a Catholic priest cost him and what being a Catholic theologian anointed within her.

Their academic arguments about gender norms and the patriarchal foundation of the priesthood often annoy Margaret as she vehemently disagrees with David's rote answer "because the Apostles were men." An intellectual, with a spicy wit, Margaret explores the why of things and wants reasoned answers while David spouts out what he has learned in seminary without much thought. He is a priest by profession and by soul. Priests are conformists beholden to an ancient written text with passages burned in their memory. By nature, their valorization of the past is a professional ethic.

Margaret and David's conversations aren't exclusive to Catholicism. They discuss everything from wine to the Mediterranean to cherries. They dine together, smile at one another, and pretend their closeness lacks intimacy.

One of my favorite passages is when they spar over the marriage of priests. It is Margaret's amazing brain that quietly seduces David even as he argues that celibacy is the practical way for priests to practice sublimation (the transformation of desire). Margaret's response is humanistic. "Religion," she says, "gives us the concept of daily life, and a way of handling its tediums, and marriage is one of its great means. Marriage is a mode of witness, an epistemology. To bar people from marriage is to prevent them from this way of knowing."

"Knowing" is such an interesting word. It's rooted in identity and you see that here, where the older version of Margaret suffers cognitive decay; she can't know yesterday and her self-worth plummets. The younger Margaret knows history, truth, theology, and life but can't know tomorrow, which feeds into her curious spirit and adventurous nature. The question the novel asks of its readers travels much deeper, however: can Margaret know love when it falls, accidentally, outside traditional boundaries?

As I was reading A Private Man I wondered if it was secular enough considering certain audiences are uncomfortable with religious frameworks. Novels have this amazing ability to transcend our regular lives but the introduction of religious themes, for some, is reductive. But I found the Catholic framing of the novel intriguing. I am not Catholic and it allowed me entrance into a room that is normally closed off. I loved the passage where Margaret is studying at Regina Mundi and she is in the washroom doing laundry when a bundle of vestments arrives. What is a chore is also an art, a duty of love.

"Quickly, the most senior washerwoman was called over, to take it on. Margaret watched as she laid the garment flat on a worktable, filled a small basin with the mildest water, got out a fresh bar of soap from a box high on a shelf, lined with glassine paper, then spread the chasuble over her knees and dabbed at the stains."

There is a difference between an easy read and a quick read. A Private Man is neither. As a novel, it asks for time. It asks its readers to live within its breathable boundaries of religion and absence. The writing is so beautiful the last thing you want to do is rush through it and yet you want to rush through it to see if David abandons the priesthood because he is in love with Margaret more than he is in love with the Church. The emotional weight of the secularity—God can be love, but love can also be love—registers quietly. Stephanie Sy-Quia has built a world within a world that readers enter and don't want to leave, that is partly biographical, and perhaps that's why it feels so personal, and that's why I read it one more time before ordering it for my mother, an Episcopal priest.

Book reviewed by Valerie Morales

Beyond the Book:
Her Beloved Rose Windows: The Masterpieces of Notre-Dame Cathedral

The magnificent rose windows of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris are considered masterpieces of engineering for their artistic beauty, mathematical precision, and structural stability. Amazingly, the windows remained intact after the debilitating Paris fire of 2019.

The windows were created for medieval viewers, many of whom were illiterate. They were visual homilies that communicated faith, love, and salvation. They were glass books telling the story of Christ and his mother. The rose shape of the windows (a Gothic design for churches widespread in Europe) was circular to represent Christ as eternal. When the sun is at its highest point, the cathedral's interior is alight in colors with the message that God's radiance is the source of all light and salvation.

The windows were a collaboration under the supervision of cathedral architects Jean de Chelles and Pierre de Montreuil but were largely the work of anonymous glaziers and artisans who specialized in stained glass.

The North Rose Window was created around 1250 and is the only rose window to maintain most of its original 13th-century glass. In the center, the Virgin Mary is holding the Christ Child. Around them are prophets, kings, judges, familiar people of the Old Testament. It is colored in striking blues.

The South Rose Window is also referred to as the "midday rose." It was donated by Saint Louis (King Louis IX of France), and built in 1260. It measures about the same size as the North Rose Window, nearly 42 feet in diameter. Both the North and South windows have around 80 panes of glass spread across multiple concentric circles. The Last Judgement is the theme of the South window, with Christ in the center surrounded by angels and images of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Its colors include intense reds. The South Rose Window has had significant color stability issues and has had to repeatedly be restored.

The West Rose Window is the smallest, around 31 feet in diameter, and is in the cathedral's front façade. It was completed around 1225 and none of the original glass remains. It illustrates the Madonna and Child. The first circle represents the 12 tribes of Israel. The 12 signs of the zodiac associated with the labors of the months of the year make up the lower half of the window.

In the novel A Private Man, the female protagonist, Margaret Bendelow, becomes agitated by the possibility that the rose windows of Notre-Dame Cathedral were destroyed after the terrible Paris fire. Margaret, when she was younger, was a religious scholar, but dementia has picked apart her brain, creating instability. Her loving grandson Adrian bikes to see her every Wednesday despite the difficulty of witnessing her belligerence and rage. The day after the Paris fire, he brings with him the local papers and puts them onto her lap so she can see the damage. Margaret grabs Adrian's wrist in desperation.

"What of the windows? What has happened to the rose windows…The ones from the thirteenth century. The works of Jean de Chelles and Pierre de Montreuil. The largest rose windows in Europe?"

The passage continues: She releases his wrist and brings her hand up over her eyes, and begins to cry. The sound of her sobs lags, and then rasps out drily. She is shaking.

Margaret is aghast at the thought that replacement windows might be fireproofed. The radiant glaze and how light filters through the cathedral would be affected. It would be one more example of the world losing its past as Margaret is losing her memories. The stained glass windows of the cathedral offer her hope with their collective stories of sacrifice and salvation. Their brilliant filtered light is confirmation that the darkest moments of her life are temporary. Dawn is coming. In other words, the Latin phrase that symbolizes Margaret Bendelow and her beloved rose windows: Fluctuat nec mergitur.

She is tossed by the waves but does not sink.

Top to bottom:
North Rose Window by Krzysztof Mizera (2008), CC BY-SA 4.0
South Rose Window by David Bordes / CMN (2024), Licence Ouverte 1.0
West Rose Window by Zairon (2017), CC BY-SA 4.0