Charlotte Wood

Fiction 2023 / 293 pages

I am a fully-recovered Catholic.  Yet this book brings me back to some of the joyous moments of my youth as a Catholic, and 12 years of Catholic school.

During my time in my all-women high school, we had two or three retreats in the convent where the nuns lived.  It was a spacious, beautiful, modern building with lots of couches, chapels, prayer rooms, individual small bedrooms. And staying there was incredibly peaceful and meditative (and prayerful).

In my first year in college, my roommate and I took a class on Community, and we spent a weekend in the convent where the Franciscan nuns who taught at my grade school lived, for our class project.  Though older and more worn, the wooden building had an aura of peace about it and the nuns embraced us with love, gentleness, and tranquil calm.  I still recall there was a lot of laughter.

Stone Yard Devotional is an unusual book, making this a difficult review to write.   The narrator, whose name we never learn, abandons her life and work as an environmentalist in Sydney, and also leaves her failed marriage, to spend a few days on a very remote piece of land in a small convent, just outside the town where the narrator grew up.  She goes for the peace and quiet, and for the meditation (though the nuns call it prayer).  On her last visit, she simply never leaves.

She never becomes a nun and is not religious.  There’s no great conversion moment, no sense of redemption; it is just women getting on with things. This probably does not sound like the most spine-tingling premise for a book, and it is not.  There is no plot as such, but Charlotte Wood's prose is very thoughtful and spiritual.  She writes in a slow, contemplative pace.

No plot doesn't mean nothing happens. There is the return of the bones of a nun who used to live in this abbey and was murdered 30 years ago.  The bones are accompanied by another nun, whom the narrator went to school with. This other nun, Helen, is a loner who seeks the limelight, a woman who was psychologically damaged in her youth and cannot really relate to anyone.

And then there are the mice.

The mouse plague is horrendous, disgusting, turn-your-stomach-ill. Mice have taken control, both indoors and outdoors, multiplying overnight, every night, and eating their food, wiring, and furniture.  And dying and smelling.  These religious women have to figure out how to come to terms with the killing they must do.  Page 147:  "We wore latex gloves and surgical masks. A macabre job: the smell, the soft bodies tumbling by the shovel load. I closed my eyes as I pushed the shovel into the pile." Poking around to learn more about this book and the author, I discover that the mice represent the Covid 19 plague.  Yes, it all makes sense, while being repulsive.

Stone Yard Devotional an introspective meditation on guilt, the nature of forgiveness, prayer, being in community, unresolved grief, relationships, personal peace and presence, and how to live in the world.

I cannot give this book a whole-hearted endorsement.  You must be someone who is in the mood for something that is not compelling, but meditative.  Neither can I not recommend it.  I am glad I read it.  I have a sense of peace, having read Stone Yard Devotional.  As long as I don't see a mouse scurrying across my kitchen floor.

I am co-reading this with my friend Mary.  I look forward to hearing what she has to say.  (I know her from that same all-women Catholic high school, mentioned in my second paragraph).

May 2025