Francesca Kay's second novel lives up to the promise of her debut, An Equal Stillness, winner of the 2009 Orange New Writers Award.
Mary-Margaret O'Reilly is a slow-witted young woman who cleans the Church of the Sacred Heart in Battersea, London. One day during Lent, she decides to wash the corpus on the crucifix in the chapel. While doing so, she falls, sustains a bloody head wound and is discovered unconscious on the floor by Stella Morrison, another parishioner. Stella is married to a member of Parliament and has two older children out in the world, but it is the youngest, Felix, away at boarding school, for whom she pines.
While in hospital, Mary-Margaret talks with Kiti Mendoza, an attendant on the evening shift, about how the Lord saved her from any real harm, how He opened his eyes to look at her, and she could see "how badly He was hurting." Kiti takes this news to her friends and a religious mania descends upon the quiet church. Father Diamond does not believe that a miracle has happened; he has always prided himself on keeping the church open and welcoming to anyone at any hour, but now he has to lock it to keep out the fanatics.
Mary-Margaret's mother, Fidelma, is an obese invalid, trapped on the 19th floor of a tower block. She is irreligious, dreaming of past glories as a femme fatale who could use her charms to get what she wanted.
Motherhood is very important in this sad story: Mary-Margaret will never have any children, so she baby-sits the child of immigrant neighbors; Fidelma knows that she was a bad mother to Mary-Margaret; Stella berates herself for allowing her son to be sent off to school.
The lives of these women and children intersect in one horrific incident that will forever change all of them. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.