"They had been friends for a long time."

McDermott builds scenes with tiny, vivid details and straightforward sentences, which are sometimes repeated later in the chapter. The repeated lines feel like a good imitation of memories, circular and hovering around emotional focal points. In one chapter, she repeats this line at a crucial moment ("They had been friends for a long time"), and it made me cry.

A lot of my positive reaction to this book is how personal it is for me. This is the time and place my grandparents were growing up (Catholic NYC in the early 20th century), so the details were personally revealing. Every once in a while, a detail would remind me of the lives of my grandmother or my great aunt, or of the houses they kept when I was small. Living memories of a different era.

As someone who is always struggling to navigate feminism and Catholicism, it was really satisfying to read the lives of these nuns who served women--nuns who both followed the rules imposed by multiple patriarchal systems and rebelled against them when they could. I really enjoyed this beautiful book, and now I want to write more like Alice McDermott.