Excerpt from The Guineveres by Sarah Domet, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

For more than a month The Guineveres had planned our escape; we'd held meetings in the Bunk Room while the other girls played Ping-Pong; we'd even followed every rule, down to ensuring our uniform skirts hit the proper length, draping the floor when kneeling, as we did every morning before prayer under threat of a JUG. A JUG was similar to a detention, only worse. It stood for Justice Under God, and it usually involved extra Bible study and some undesirable chore detail, like scrubbing the old folks' lobby or changing one of the convalescents' bedclothes or washing down the blackboard in the Instruction room, then clapping out the erasers that coated the insides of our noses with a fine layer of chalk.

Each of us had our role in the grand escape plot. Gwen was charged with securing extra blankets that she'd pilfered on the most recent Wash Day when Sister Claire wasn't looking, then tucked beneath her mattress. Win, who had recently been assigned to kitchen duty, was tasked with appropriating food, no easy feat since our uniforms had no pockets. She managed to stow away a few bags of dry oatmeal, some raisins, and a jar of peanut butter, placing them in the sanitary closet, where nobody would think to look. Every girl felt shame when she opened the sanitary closet each month, as though her body had betrayed her, and so our food supply remained in there for two weeks, untouched. For my part, I gathered grooming sundries, items Gwen said were essential: toothpaste, tissues, a bar of soap, a hairbrush. Poor Ginny wasn't given a task at all. We found her unreliable but well-intentioned—a weakened constitution, she claimed, from her asthma—so we asked her to carry the burden of worry for the rest of us. She did that with ease.

We planned to find our way to the city. The Guineveres had pulled together what we knew of the surrounding terrain from our memories of being brought to the convent. Ginny had the most specialized knowledge, having been taken to the hospital last year for yet another bout of asthma that the rest of us knew was really just hyperventilating brought on by excessive concern. "We're practically in the middle of a desolate forest," Ginny had reported. And when we pressed her further she conceded that she did remember passing houses along the way to the hospital, and a general store, and a bank, now that she thought of it. "It had a clock so bright that from a distance I thought it was the moon," she said.

The Guineveres would hike through the woods to town; it couldn't be more than fifteen miles, we figured. We'd avoid the main roads. We'd stop to rest if we had to. "But we won't get dirty," Gwen had said, reminding us of our need to keep our dignity. Then we'd take a bus to the city, where we'd get jobs as secretaries at first, and we'd rent an apartment, the four of us. Ginny wanted to go to art school, eventually. Gwen wanted to work as a sales clerk at Tiffany's while auditioning for theater productions.

"Of course," Gwen had said, "later we'll all get married. To executives."

"Yes, to executives," we all repeated.

Win thought she would become a hairdresser at first, maybe eventually earn a beautician's license. Braiding our hair felt like a logic puzzle to her, she said, and she had great spatial awareness. Plus, she preferred manual labor to paperwork. Win was big-boned and strong, a fact that led the Sisters to recruit her help carrying the large sacks of flour and potatoes that were delivered to the convent each month. As for myself, I hadn't developed many specialized interests or skills, except a keen memory for church history. At night, while the other girls slept, I'd write in my notebook all the saints I could remember. My mother and I used to do that, memorize parts of the Bible together: Adam begat Seth who begat Enos who begat sons and daughters and so on. I'd jot down as many of their names as I could, pretend I was listing the branches of my own family tree. Because that's what I wanted to do when I got out—to belong somewhere, to someone, to a big family. When I told The Guineveres this, they scoffed, said I needed grander dreams than that. I never mentioned it again, and if prodded, I explained to them that I wanted to become a schoolteacher. This answer pleased The Guineveres just fine.

Excerpted from The Guineveres by Sarah Domet. Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Domet. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.