Thanks for the recommendation. Just reading her blog and her bio at GoodReads, I love her!
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/133576.Sharon_Pywell/blog
Like other teachers, she finds:
.... students increasingly resist reading anything longer than a text. Of course this isn’t all students. But something’s changing. There’s a connection between this pattern and the current state of the Union: reading fiction develops the capacity to see contradiction, decode the implied, value the truth. Not reading does the opposite.
I have been confused by the increasing trouble my students have explaining what is truly going on in human interactions they find in fiction. How does this character feel? I may ask. “Good,” they’ll say. They ignore the fact that the character is lying and the preceding hundred pages made that clear. Lies, I have told my students, are the engines that drive the narrative arc upward to its crisis point ....
I think you will really like her writing style. She writes some bits in a Japanese mind, thoughts that are shared by an American mind, that are gorgeous. Lots of research had to have gone into that. Prescience, purgatory, religiousity or not. Now that I have told you this much, you really must read it.
I'm starting Chapter 3 - THANK YOU for the recommendation. I love this author!
Her voice!
This little girl with all her questions. The awful nun. The martyred saint.
Bought the ebook yesterday and love love love it!