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Sister Holiday Mystery #1
Scorched Grace
Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test in this debut crime novel.
When Saint Sebastian's School becomes the target of a shocking arson spree, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and their surrounding community are thrust into chaos. Unsatisfied with the officials' response, sardonic and headstrong Sister Holiday becomes determined to unveil the mysterious attacker herself and return her home and sanctuary to its former peace. Her investigation leads down a twisty path of suspicion and secrets in the sticky, oppressive New Orleans heat, turning her against colleagues, students, and even fellow Sisters along the way.
Sister Holiday is more faithful than most, but she's no saint. To piece together the clues of this high-stakes mystery, she must first reckon with the sins of her checkered past-and neither task will be easy.
An exciting start to Margot Douaihy's bold series for Gillian Flynn Books that breathes new life into the hard-boiled genre, Scorched Grace is a fast-paced and punchy whodunnit that will keep readers guessing until the very end.
When Saint Sebastian's School becomes the target of a shocking arson spree, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and their surrounding community are thrust into chaos. Unsatisfied with the officials' response, sardonic and headstrong Sister Holiday becomes determined to unveil the mysterious attacker herself and return her home and sanctuary to its former peace. Her investigation leads down a twisty path of suspicion and secrets in the sticky, oppressive New Orleans heat, turning her against colleagues, students, and even fellow Sisters along the way.
Sister Holiday is more faithful than most, but she's no saint. To piece together the clues of this high-stakes mystery, she must first reckon with the sins of her checkered past-and neither task will be easy.
An exciting start to Margot Douaihy's bold series for Gillian Flynn Books that breathes new life into the hard-boiled genre, Scorched Grace is a fast-paced and punchy whodunnit that will keep readers guessing until the very end.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published February 21, 2023
About the author
Margot Douaihy
10 books233 followersMargot Douaihy (b. Scranton, PA) lives and works in Northampton, MA. She earned a BA in Writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University.
Douaihy is the author of the lyrical crime novel SCORCHED GRACE (Gillian Flynn Books, 2023), which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Best Book of 2023 by Marie Claire and BookPage Readers’ Choice, and one of the most anticipated crime books of the year by Crime Reads and LGBTQ Reads. She is also the author of the poetry collections Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, Scranton Lace, Girls Like You (Clemson University Press) and I Would Ruby If I Could (Factory Hollow Press).
A Co-Editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Crime Narrative Series and Multimodal/Multimedia Section Editor of Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Douaihy’s work has been featured in Adirondack Review, American Microreviews & Interviews, APIARY, Atticus Review, Broadkill Review, Colorado Review, The Common by Amherst College, Diode, Exposition Review, Indianapolis Review, The Florida Review, North American Review, ONE ART Poetry Journal, PBS NewsHour, The Madison Review, Muswell Press, Mystery Tribune, Portland Review, and others.
An award-winning educator, editor, and mentor, Douaihy has held teaching positions at Marywood University, Franklin Pierce University, and the Creative Alliance of New Orleans. In fall 2023, Margot will join Emerson College as an Assistant Professor in Popular Fiction Writing and Literature.
Honors include a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship (2022), The Florida Review Humboldt Poetry Prize, Runner-Up (2021), Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award, Finalist (2021), Ernest Hemingway Foundation Hemingway Shorts, Finalist (2021), Lambda Literary Award Poetry, Finalist (2015), and First Book Foundation of Greater New Orleans Grant, Winner (2009).
A founding member of the Creative Writing Studies Organization and an active member of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), Douaihy is represented by United Agents, Laura Macdougall (literary) and Jennifer Thomas (screen).
Douaihy is the author of the lyrical crime novel SCORCHED GRACE (Gillian Flynn Books, 2023), which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Best Book of 2023 by Marie Claire and BookPage Readers’ Choice, and one of the most anticipated crime books of the year by Crime Reads and LGBTQ Reads. She is also the author of the poetry collections Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, Scranton Lace, Girls Like You (Clemson University Press) and I Would Ruby If I Could (Factory Hollow Press).
A Co-Editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Crime Narrative Series and Multimodal/Multimedia Section Editor of Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Douaihy’s work has been featured in Adirondack Review, American Microreviews & Interviews, APIARY, Atticus Review, Broadkill Review, Colorado Review, The Common by Amherst College, Diode, Exposition Review, Indianapolis Review, The Florida Review, North American Review, ONE ART Poetry Journal, PBS NewsHour, The Madison Review, Muswell Press, Mystery Tribune, Portland Review, and others.
An award-winning educator, editor, and mentor, Douaihy has held teaching positions at Marywood University, Franklin Pierce University, and the Creative Alliance of New Orleans. In fall 2023, Margot will join Emerson College as an Assistant Professor in Popular Fiction Writing and Literature.
Honors include a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship (2022), The Florida Review Humboldt Poetry Prize, Runner-Up (2021), Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award, Finalist (2021), Ernest Hemingway Foundation Hemingway Shorts, Finalist (2021), Lambda Literary Award Poetry, Finalist (2015), and First Book Foundation of Greater New Orleans Grant, Winner (2009).
A founding member of the Creative Writing Studies Organization and an active member of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), Douaihy is represented by United Agents, Laura Macdougall (literary) and Jennifer Thomas (screen).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,507 reviews
March 2, 2023
Three cheers for representation of a cussin', drinkin', smokin', horny punk rocker lesbian nun! Sadly that's where my enthusiasm ends. It's awesome to see a novel push back on every stereotype imaginable with the lead character, but once that novelty wears off there's not much to hang on to.
The side characters are a particularly weak bunch. When an unknown pyro sets daily fires to a Catholic school, killing some in the process, our fierce nun aims to sleuth out the culprit. But with the other characters so boring, there's very little investment in finding out whodunit. The mystery is also exceedingly simple, with only the most overused red herrings and situations of danger. At one point the culprit locks the nun in a janitor closet and leaves a dead animal as a "warning" that she needs to back off.
As much as I love YA mysteries from the '90s, I was expecting something more complex from the debut novel of Gillian Flynn's publishing company. Books like this are exactly why Gone Girl was such a game-changer. My hope was that Flynn had scouted out authors who could play at her level while we wait in agony for her next book. Not so much with this one.
All that said, I did finish the book in just a few days. Usually I’m a very slow reader and I also put down a lot of books that can’t keep my attention. So clearly it did something right to get me over the finish line.
I’d love to hear what fans of novel like about it. Maybe there’s something in the discussions around religion that speak to others more personally. I come from a deeply religiously family, but not Catholic and honestly I’ve been eager to put all that cult stuff behind me. For that reason, the nun’s religious journey didn’t resonate with me. How much of that is fault of the author versus fault of my own baggage I’m not sure.
The side characters are a particularly weak bunch. When an unknown pyro sets daily fires to a Catholic school, killing some in the process, our fierce nun aims to sleuth out the culprit. But with the other characters so boring, there's very little investment in finding out whodunit. The mystery is also exceedingly simple, with only the most overused red herrings and situations of danger. At one point the culprit locks the nun in a janitor closet and leaves a dead animal as a "warning" that she needs to back off.
As much as I love YA mysteries from the '90s, I was expecting something more complex from the debut novel of Gillian Flynn's publishing company. Books like this are exactly why Gone Girl was such a game-changer. My hope was that Flynn had scouted out authors who could play at her level while we wait in agony for her next book. Not so much with this one.
All that said, I did finish the book in just a few days. Usually I’m a very slow reader and I also put down a lot of books that can’t keep my attention. So clearly it did something right to get me over the finish line.
I’d love to hear what fans of novel like about it. Maybe there’s something in the discussions around religion that speak to others more personally. I come from a deeply religiously family, but not Catholic and honestly I’ve been eager to put all that cult stuff behind me. For that reason, the nun’s religious journey didn’t resonate with me. How much of that is fault of the author versus fault of my own baggage I’m not sure.
March 5, 2024
This book has an intriguing premise but fell short for me. The former Holiday Walsh (no relation) from NY is now Sister Holiday of the Sisters of Sublime Blood in sweltery New Orleans, where she teaches music in the adjacent Catholic school, St. Sebastian. In her past, she lived a riotous life of sex, drugs and rock and roll. She identifies as a lesbian, and the great love of her life is a woman who is now married. She has had past hookups with a male bartender and other men. She was a member of a punk band. As Sister Holiday, she dresses from head to foot in black to cover her many tattoos; her bleached blond hair shows its dark roots, and she has a gold tooth that resulted from a bar fight. Her conversations are littered with curse words, and even her prayers include swearing. One of the small group of nuns is opposed to her, as is the science teacher and members of the police force. Others on the staff tolerate and encourage Sister Holiday in her quest for grace and salvation.
I hoped to learn how she reconciled her feminist and religious beliefs with the Roman Catholic religion and the misogynist members of the Diocese who run the school. The narrative is in the form of a random inner monologue. This stream of consciousness contains contradictions and lacks consistency. The reason she became a nun is revealed late in the book. She made the quick decision after a selfish, thoughtless act that ended in tragedy. Long-term therapy should have been ordered before she made the decision.
Sister Holiday has empathy and connects with most students, but she lacks sympathy for a charity student with a problematic background. He presents himself as a rebel, a bad boy who walks a pit bull. She has beaten him with a metal ruler. When a mystery arises at the school, he becomes her main suspect. She maintains her chain-smoking habit by confiscating cigarettes and occasional liquor from unruly students and smoking in a nearby alleyway. She is devout in her own way, refers to God as They, and mentions she only prays to female saints. Her sympathy doesn't extend to everyone. When she discovers the history teacher has been drinking on the job, she reports him to the police instead of counselling him and suggesting an intervention. He loses his position and has an invalid wife to support.
Sister Holiday fancies herself a skillful detective from watching TV shows and reading a Raymond Chandler book. She rescues two injured students when a fire destroys classrooms, but the janitor has already died. She inserts herself into the investigation, but her efforts seem inept. Her research involves asking suspects about their location during the fire and blaming individual suspects. She rarely finds new information that the police don't already know. Her detective work becomes more urgent when a second fire in the building leaves a nun dead, a school bus burns and another Catholic school is targeted. She believes she is being set up as the perpetrator. Her personal belongings have been left in noticeable places, her mail has been opened, she is locked in a closet, and a dead cat is left as a warning.
Fortunately, she first stumbles upon the solution to the mystery before the police or fire investigators. She notices a clue on an individual that she overlooked in the past. When she confronts that person, they immediately and thoroughly confess all the crimes. They state their motive was their belief that they were following God's orders.
I read Book #1 in the Sister Holiday series because I have the second on my waiting list. Now that she has successfully solved a complicated crime through luck, I am interested in seeing what methods she next uses in detection. I also want a more precise explanation of her religious beliefs, how she reconciles them, and her behaviour with Roman Catholicism.
I hoped to learn how she reconciled her feminist and religious beliefs with the Roman Catholic religion and the misogynist members of the Diocese who run the school. The narrative is in the form of a random inner monologue. This stream of consciousness contains contradictions and lacks consistency. The reason she became a nun is revealed late in the book. She made the quick decision after a selfish, thoughtless act that ended in tragedy. Long-term therapy should have been ordered before she made the decision.
Sister Holiday has empathy and connects with most students, but she lacks sympathy for a charity student with a problematic background. He presents himself as a rebel, a bad boy who walks a pit bull. She has beaten him with a metal ruler. When a mystery arises at the school, he becomes her main suspect. She maintains her chain-smoking habit by confiscating cigarettes and occasional liquor from unruly students and smoking in a nearby alleyway. She is devout in her own way, refers to God as They, and mentions she only prays to female saints. Her sympathy doesn't extend to everyone. When she discovers the history teacher has been drinking on the job, she reports him to the police instead of counselling him and suggesting an intervention. He loses his position and has an invalid wife to support.
Sister Holiday fancies herself a skillful detective from watching TV shows and reading a Raymond Chandler book. She rescues two injured students when a fire destroys classrooms, but the janitor has already died. She inserts herself into the investigation, but her efforts seem inept. Her research involves asking suspects about their location during the fire and blaming individual suspects. She rarely finds new information that the police don't already know. Her detective work becomes more urgent when a second fire in the building leaves a nun dead, a school bus burns and another Catholic school is targeted. She believes she is being set up as the perpetrator. Her personal belongings have been left in noticeable places, her mail has been opened, she is locked in a closet, and a dead cat is left as a warning.
Fortunately, she first stumbles upon the solution to the mystery before the police or fire investigators. She notices a clue on an individual that she overlooked in the past. When she confronts that person, they immediately and thoroughly confess all the crimes. They state their motive was their belief that they were following God's orders.
I read Book #1 in the Sister Holiday series because I have the second on my waiting list. Now that she has successfully solved a complicated crime through luck, I am interested in seeing what methods she next uses in detection. I also want a more precise explanation of her religious beliefs, how she reconciles them, and her behaviour with Roman Catholicism.
April 12, 2023
i can’t believe gillian flynn set me up like this
June 20, 2023
My introduction to the fiction of Margot Douaihy is Scorched Grace. Published in 2023, this novel introduces a wonderful amateur detective in Sister Holiday Walsh, a thirty-three-year-old chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun who matches wits with an arsonist who seems to have targeted Saint Sebastian's School in New Orleans. Like many strong writers turned loose with a first-person narrative, Douaihy riveted me in the early chapters as she established her world in the voice of a completely original sleuth.
Sister Holiday has been given sanctuary by the Sisters of the Sublime Blood. She's the youngest staff member of Saint Sebastian's, teaching a guitar ensemble class (taking students from the Ramones to Django Reinhardt, with quantifiable results). As one of four nuns at the school, she's given up conveniences like a cell phone, personal computer, car, mirrors and money of her own. Gloves and a neck scarf cover up her tattoos, remnants of her days playing bass for an all-girl punk band in Brooklyn called Original Sin. Her vice remains cigarettes, which she obtains by confiscating them from the student body.
Stepping into the alley that serves as her private smoking lounge before supper on Sunday, Sister Holiday witnesses one of Saint Sebastian's janitors, Jack Corolla, fall on fire from the second floor of the east wing of the school. She rescues two students she finds huddled in a classroom, both of whom are seriously injured by smoke or glass. A young arson investigator, Magnolia Riveaux, confides to Sister Holiday that arson is the cause. Unsatisfied with the progress of the police investigation, Sister Holiday begins to search the school, church or rectory for clues. She has a history of sleuthing, dating back to high school.
They talked so freely in front of me, they must have thought I was praying. And I let them think that. I made the sign of the cross again. People view nuns as nameless clones, a collective noun rather than individuals. That was ironic, because, denuded of so-called luxuries like cell phones and social media, leading lives of service and prayer, nuns cultivated rich inner worlds. Real inner dialogue. Most female mystics were nuns. Beatrice of Nazareth. Consolata Betrone. Sister Helen Prejean is more of a badass than most self-proclaimed radicals moaning about the ethical failings of single-use plastic straws. Nuns forge genuine connections, soul to eternal soul. What choice do we have but to be achingly present?
Margot Douaihy's prose, her sensibility and her one-of-a-kind protagonist put Scorched Grace over the bar for me. The paragraphs flooded by description--of New Orleans, of fire, of sex--knocked me out. I was absorbed by the activities of a private Catholic school and the rituals of Sister Holiday's faith, though the book contains more of the former than the latter. Vivid and witty, Douaihy establishes why a nun is well-suited to solve crime. The mood is similar to Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt mysteries, rough as opposed to cozy. Douaihy exhibits her punk rock influence admirably.
My wisdom held a kind of grace, I'll admit.
I offered my students the only thing that mattered in life--honesty--and I served it the way I meted out revenge, ice cold. I was a fuckup about most things, but when it came to commitment, I was all in, like a python eating a goat, sinew and toenails and skeleton and all. Like my Sisters, I did everything I could to lift each student, to help them carry the light in their own hands, not hold it for them. Sometimes that meant calling out their sloth and turpitude. And I knew how to clock BS because I lived it. To break a horse or a human, you must first understand wildness.
Scorched Grace is Douaihy's debut novel and my criticism of it is that a mystery is not incorporated in a strong way. Sister Holiday is a detective who spends most of her time ambushing investigators or others and not that much time detecting. Her social work takes her to the Women's Birth Center of a prison, a location fertile with intimate mysteries. In contrast, Sister Holiday's relationship to the janitor or her school feel tenuous. I thought she would've been fine had investigators done their jobs. The mystery element comes off with very low import.
As debuts go, Scorched Grace is dazzling. I'm looking forward to the next in the series. I would've enjoyed a novel set in Sister Holiday's guitar ensemble class, that's how much I enjoyed this character. The book has a bananas cover design and illustration by Will Staehle. It sold me this book quicker than a box of Girl Scouts cookies.
Sister Holiday has been given sanctuary by the Sisters of the Sublime Blood. She's the youngest staff member of Saint Sebastian's, teaching a guitar ensemble class (taking students from the Ramones to Django Reinhardt, with quantifiable results). As one of four nuns at the school, she's given up conveniences like a cell phone, personal computer, car, mirrors and money of her own. Gloves and a neck scarf cover up her tattoos, remnants of her days playing bass for an all-girl punk band in Brooklyn called Original Sin. Her vice remains cigarettes, which she obtains by confiscating them from the student body.
Stepping into the alley that serves as her private smoking lounge before supper on Sunday, Sister Holiday witnesses one of Saint Sebastian's janitors, Jack Corolla, fall on fire from the second floor of the east wing of the school. She rescues two students she finds huddled in a classroom, both of whom are seriously injured by smoke or glass. A young arson investigator, Magnolia Riveaux, confides to Sister Holiday that arson is the cause. Unsatisfied with the progress of the police investigation, Sister Holiday begins to search the school, church or rectory for clues. She has a history of sleuthing, dating back to high school.
They talked so freely in front of me, they must have thought I was praying. And I let them think that. I made the sign of the cross again. People view nuns as nameless clones, a collective noun rather than individuals. That was ironic, because, denuded of so-called luxuries like cell phones and social media, leading lives of service and prayer, nuns cultivated rich inner worlds. Real inner dialogue. Most female mystics were nuns. Beatrice of Nazareth. Consolata Betrone. Sister Helen Prejean is more of a badass than most self-proclaimed radicals moaning about the ethical failings of single-use plastic straws. Nuns forge genuine connections, soul to eternal soul. What choice do we have but to be achingly present?
Margot Douaihy's prose, her sensibility and her one-of-a-kind protagonist put Scorched Grace over the bar for me. The paragraphs flooded by description--of New Orleans, of fire, of sex--knocked me out. I was absorbed by the activities of a private Catholic school and the rituals of Sister Holiday's faith, though the book contains more of the former than the latter. Vivid and witty, Douaihy establishes why a nun is well-suited to solve crime. The mood is similar to Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt mysteries, rough as opposed to cozy. Douaihy exhibits her punk rock influence admirably.
My wisdom held a kind of grace, I'll admit.
I offered my students the only thing that mattered in life--honesty--and I served it the way I meted out revenge, ice cold. I was a fuckup about most things, but when it came to commitment, I was all in, like a python eating a goat, sinew and toenails and skeleton and all. Like my Sisters, I did everything I could to lift each student, to help them carry the light in their own hands, not hold it for them. Sometimes that meant calling out their sloth and turpitude. And I knew how to clock BS because I lived it. To break a horse or a human, you must first understand wildness.
Scorched Grace is Douaihy's debut novel and my criticism of it is that a mystery is not incorporated in a strong way. Sister Holiday is a detective who spends most of her time ambushing investigators or others and not that much time detecting. Her social work takes her to the Women's Birth Center of a prison, a location fertile with intimate mysteries. In contrast, Sister Holiday's relationship to the janitor or her school feel tenuous. I thought she would've been fine had investigators done their jobs. The mystery element comes off with very low import.
As debuts go, Scorched Grace is dazzling. I'm looking forward to the next in the series. I would've enjoyed a novel set in Sister Holiday's guitar ensemble class, that's how much I enjoyed this character. The book has a bananas cover design and illustration by Will Staehle. It sold me this book quicker than a box of Girl Scouts cookies.
February 20, 2023
Very interesting concepts that didn't work for me. I love a whodunnit, love a sleuth who isn't in law enforcement, love a mystery suspense, ESPECIALLY one with queer leads. However. This just didn't work. The stream of consciousness made things feel so incoherent and unconnected. The flashbacks were there for trauma porn and instilling the queer pain element. There was so much pain in this. There should be a lot more CWs shared for this book (I've listed as many as I could remember below.)
The arson mystery did not feel high enough stakes, and with the rambling narrative, we would get stuck in the weeds of random storylines and flashbacks. Also why were there so many discussions on sweat? We get it, New Orleans is hot, and people sweat and are moist. There's a potential romantic breadcrumb dropped between a couple potential characters, but everyone in this kind of sucked. The characters were either insufferable or had no depth, and it felt like the author put all effort into sharing their traumas instead of anything about them in the present day. Also, knowing that this book is published by Gillian Flynn made having a character called Flynn cringey, even though I bet it was meant to be kind.
There isn't much explanation into how this nun goes from 0 to "I must solve this mystery since the police are useless" until the ending, which made it very hard to care throughout the story. I didn't enjoy this; the mystery was meh, the characters were both awful and traumatized to the maximum, the romantic interest subplot was weak, the writing was difficult to keep track of with the different nuns and officers. This was tragique. I should have DNFed but was really hoping for some kind of twisted ending. (There isn't.)
I did love the cover, and the narrator was the only thing keeping the book together. To leave this on a slightly positive note.
CWs for this book: death of an animal, multiple teens raping a different teen, slut shaming & victim blaming rape survivor, substance abuse (alcohol, cocaine), self-harm (cutting), addiction (opioids, alcoholism), arson/death by suffocation from fires or burned alive, sexual harassment, police brutality, abuse of power and sexual threat by police officer, drunk driving, homomisia, parental neglect and kicking out queer teen, unhoused teens, father raping daughter and getting her pregnant, cheating (lead has relationship with married woman for eons).
My own pet peeves: too many mentions of sweating, bad breath, clipping nails.
I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All views are my own.
The arson mystery did not feel high enough stakes, and with the rambling narrative, we would get stuck in the weeds of random storylines and flashbacks. Also why were there so many discussions on sweat? We get it, New Orleans is hot, and people sweat and are moist. There's a potential romantic breadcrumb dropped between a couple potential characters, but everyone in this kind of sucked. The characters were either insufferable or had no depth, and it felt like the author put all effort into sharing their traumas instead of anything about them in the present day. Also, knowing that this book is published by Gillian Flynn made having a character called Flynn cringey, even though I bet it was meant to be kind.
There isn't much explanation into how this nun goes from 0 to "I must solve this mystery since the police are useless" until the ending, which made it very hard to care throughout the story. I didn't enjoy this; the mystery was meh, the characters were both awful and traumatized to the maximum, the romantic interest subplot was weak, the writing was difficult to keep track of with the different nuns and officers. This was tragique. I should have DNFed but was really hoping for some kind of twisted ending. (There isn't.)
I did love the cover, and the narrator was the only thing keeping the book together. To leave this on a slightly positive note.
CWs for this book: death of an animal, multiple teens raping a different teen, slut shaming & victim blaming rape survivor, substance abuse (alcohol, cocaine), self-harm (cutting), addiction (opioids, alcoholism), arson/death by suffocation from fires or burned alive, sexual harassment, police brutality, abuse of power and sexual threat by police officer, drunk driving, homomisia, parental neglect and kicking out queer teen, unhoused teens, father raping daughter and getting her pregnant, cheating (lead has relationship with married woman for eons).
My own pet peeves: too many mentions of sweating, bad breath, clipping nails.
I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All views are my own.
Read
May 11, 2023I'm dnf'ing at 20%.
A nun is a nun, I guess. No matter how punk rock they are, no matter how much they bleach their hair messily or how much they smoke. As a person who doesn't have a religious mind, and because all the ways Sister Holiday does not fit in are so much emphasized in the marketing of this book, I was expecting a person with a little more critical approach, but underneath it all, she is very much a normal religious person. I don't mean to insult anyone, it's just not what I want to read about.
Maybe it changes later in the book but I don't feel like I want to invest any more time into finding out. I'm not rating either since I didn't even make it halfway.
Nevertheless I don't see it as a loss that I purchased a copy of this book since the cover is real fine.
A nun is a nun, I guess. No matter how punk rock they are, no matter how much they bleach their hair messily or how much they smoke. As a person who doesn't have a religious mind, and because all the ways Sister Holiday does not fit in are so much emphasized in the marketing of this book, I was expecting a person with a little more critical approach, but underneath it all, she is very much a normal religious person. I don't mean to insult anyone, it's just not what I want to read about.
Maybe it changes later in the book but I don't feel like I want to invest any more time into finding out. I'm not rating either since I didn't even make it halfway.
Nevertheless I don't see it as a loss that I purchased a copy of this book since the cover is real fine.
Read
July 30, 2023Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if I have good things to say. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book and then write a GR review about it would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
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I feel like a bit of a wanker for saying this, but I think I was more interested in this book than I ultimately liked it. It might just be because I’m not the biggest contemporary mystery reader (I like classic noir and cosy detective nonsense) so it didn’t have the right genre places to go in my brain. Don’t get me wrong, it intrigued me. But it also frustrated me. And while it definitely positions itself as a kind of modern noir (the heroine incorrectly notes that Philip Marlowe is the best of the private eyes, when it is clearly Sam Spade) its resolution ended up feeling a little … random, almost? Not necessarily the revelation of the culprit but how the heroine got there, even though I recognise that noir detectives aren’t methodologically transparent in the way more cosy or procedural detectives are.
In any case, the book is narrated in deliberately anarchic fashion by its protagonist Sister Holiday, a queer, tattooed, former punk-rock disaster now turned nun. She works for a small—dwindling even—progressive order in New Orleans (the only order that would take her) but the peaceful existence she has carved out amongst her three sisters is brought to an abrupt end up when the school attached the nunnery catches fire and a body plummets from an upstairs window. Sister Holiday immediately cast herself in the role of sleuth and, well, things proceed from there.
Part mystery, part confession, part meditation on the nature of faith and identity, Scorched Grace definitely carried me along. I did kind of figure out whodunnit, long before Sister Holiday, but only by using the rather tawdry tools of meta-narrative i.e. there was no-one else it could be who would feel thematically appropriate and emotionally satisfying. And even then I remained kind of vague on the whys of it: I mean motives are given, both secular and divine, but I failed to see how the undertaken actions (burning shit down and murdering folks) were supposed to address the stated problem or bring about the perpetrator’s intended result. Or maybe the point was, they were just bananas. Except that’s a bit of a meh conclusion to a mystery.
To be fair, though, Scorched Grace is as much a character study than a mystery. And on those grounds it really succeeds – I was as much compelled by the mystery that is Sister Holiday herself and the fascinating contradictions of her character (she’s profane yet devout, hard-bitten yet loving) than whatever was going on with somebody setting schools on fire. The narrative voice, whether it’s talking about faith or love or New Orleans itself is so distinct:
Take this:
Or this:
I think this is the first book in what will be a series (it carries the tagline A Sister Holiday Mystery) so it’s probably unfair of me to feel somewhat underserved by some aspects of the book. There are plotlines that don’t seem to go anywhere (what happened with the two queer boys who were sleeping in the school—were they okay?!), characters who seem significant, are there for a scene or two and then seem to be forgotten, and climatic scenes that end up feeling rushed and inconclusive (like when Sister Holiday’s ex shows up at the end). And I honestly can’t tell to what degree these aspects of the story were, uh, bugs or features. Whether it was simply ambition escaping execution, storylines/relationships intended to be continued in future books, or things deliberately left unresolved and uncertain because noir takes place in an inherently disordered universe (even if your concept of that universe has a god in it).
Speaking of god, I would also have appreciated a bit more about Sister Holiday’s faith here and there. I’ve read other reviews which seem to have wanted her to be more radical/iconoclastic but I kind of appreciated the way that she was, uh, really very fucking Catholic. She says herself that “Religion is like art, we all get to make our own interpretations” and there’s a degree to which she does, in fact, live this—her god is a ‘they’, she never says the Our Father, only the Hail Mary—but trauma, suffering and even punishment are inescapably at the core of her faith, even if she also finds peace, purpose and meaning in it too. I think where I slightly came unstuck on a purely personal level is that, at one point, she acknowledges that she belongs to one of the most oppressive organisations in the world. And while it’s not for me to, like, judge either real people or fictional ones for their choices I kind of wanted to know more about how she reconciled that or, for that matter, didn’t reconcile that. Just having the quiet bit said out loud in the actual narration kind of a drew attention to an elephant in the room I would otherwise have politely ignored for the sake of the story.
I don’t think it helped that I couldn’t tell whether I was supposed to think Sister Holiday was a good sleuth or a bad one, somewhere in the middle, or if it mattered at all. She tells us that she’s sleuth and does, indeed, notice a few pieces of evidence the police—who may or may not be useless—miss. But she also tampers with crime scenes and evidence, doesn’t follow up on obvious leads, fails to really put anything together and works out what’s going by what feels like sheer chance (divine intervention?) at the end.
I should also probably mention that is, you know, terribly gritty. Violence, sexual violence, addiction, homophobia, oppression and alienation of all kinds: I honestly got so, no pun intended, burned out on it all that I kind of stopped feeling anything by the halfway point and had become so unshockable that even the final revelation of what led Sister Holiday to become a nun came across as overwrought to the point of absurdity. I mean, it was thematic, yes. But also, wait, what? You did what?
The other thing that occasionally sort of caught me off guard—though it shouldn’t have—was what came across to me as Sister Holiday’s very .. binarist, I suppose, view of men and women. I know her god is a ‘they’ but she speaks of men and women in very absolute terms throughout the book.
Or
I’m not saying this is wrong or bad. I have queer friends who talk like this too. It’s just—as someone who sort of dwells in the middle of things as fluidly as possible—it is personally confusing to me. On top of which I really hate the fact that the current cultural context has made it impossible to take this kind of discourse at face value. Although let me emphasise that it is not the discourse in itself that is the problem; it is the way TERFism has positioned itself, or been positioned, relative to feminism. In any case, this is very much a your mileage my vary type situation and—given how far out of my lane I am right now—I would like to return to my car.
Oh, and I learned it’s very hot in New Orleans and everybody is sweating constantly.
Anyway: complicated feelings for a complicated book.
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if I have good things to say. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book and then write a GR review about it would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
*******************************************
I feel like a bit of a wanker for saying this, but I think I was more interested in this book than I ultimately liked it. It might just be because I’m not the biggest contemporary mystery reader (I like classic noir and cosy detective nonsense) so it didn’t have the right genre places to go in my brain. Don’t get me wrong, it intrigued me. But it also frustrated me. And while it definitely positions itself as a kind of modern noir (the heroine incorrectly notes that Philip Marlowe is the best of the private eyes, when it is clearly Sam Spade) its resolution ended up feeling a little … random, almost? Not necessarily the revelation of the culprit but how the heroine got there, even though I recognise that noir detectives aren’t methodologically transparent in the way more cosy or procedural detectives are.
In any case, the book is narrated in deliberately anarchic fashion by its protagonist Sister Holiday, a queer, tattooed, former punk-rock disaster now turned nun. She works for a small—dwindling even—progressive order in New Orleans (the only order that would take her) but the peaceful existence she has carved out amongst her three sisters is brought to an abrupt end up when the school attached the nunnery catches fire and a body plummets from an upstairs window. Sister Holiday immediately cast herself in the role of sleuth and, well, things proceed from there.
Part mystery, part confession, part meditation on the nature of faith and identity, Scorched Grace definitely carried me along. I did kind of figure out whodunnit, long before Sister Holiday, but only by using the rather tawdry tools of meta-narrative i.e. there was no-one else it could be who would feel thematically appropriate and emotionally satisfying. And even then I remained kind of vague on the whys of it: I mean motives are given, both secular and divine, but I failed to see how the undertaken actions (burning shit down and murdering folks) were supposed to address the stated problem or bring about the perpetrator’s intended result. Or maybe the point was, they were just bananas. Except that’s a bit of a meh conclusion to a mystery.
To be fair, though, Scorched Grace is as much a character study than a mystery. And on those grounds it really succeeds – I was as much compelled by the mystery that is Sister Holiday herself and the fascinating contradictions of her character (she’s profane yet devout, hard-bitten yet loving) than whatever was going on with somebody setting schools on fire. The narrative voice, whether it’s talking about faith or love or New Orleans itself is so distinct:
Take this:
The sky was a vibrant mottle of blue and white, threaded with the inflections of birdsong. Green parrots, robins, and silver mourning doves incanted their secret codes.
Or this:
But our bodies are holy and meant to be shared, for a time, at least. Jesus was given to us in the form of a human. During Communion, the wafer transforms into Jesus’s body and blood on our tongues. Transubstantiation. Inking my body was also holy. Sure, the needle hurt sometimes. But it should hurt. Salvation required sacrifice.
I think this is the first book in what will be a series (it carries the tagline A Sister Holiday Mystery) so it’s probably unfair of me to feel somewhat underserved by some aspects of the book. There are plotlines that don’t seem to go anywhere (what happened with the two queer boys who were sleeping in the school—were they okay?!), characters who seem significant, are there for a scene or two and then seem to be forgotten, and climatic scenes that end up feeling rushed and inconclusive (like when Sister Holiday’s ex shows up at the end). And I honestly can’t tell to what degree these aspects of the story were, uh, bugs or features. Whether it was simply ambition escaping execution, storylines/relationships intended to be continued in future books, or things deliberately left unresolved and uncertain because noir takes place in an inherently disordered universe (even if your concept of that universe has a god in it).
Speaking of god, I would also have appreciated a bit more about Sister Holiday’s faith here and there. I’ve read other reviews which seem to have wanted her to be more radical/iconoclastic but I kind of appreciated the way that she was, uh, really very fucking Catholic. She says herself that “Religion is like art, we all get to make our own interpretations” and there’s a degree to which she does, in fact, live this—her god is a ‘they’, she never says the Our Father, only the Hail Mary—but trauma, suffering and even punishment are inescapably at the core of her faith, even if she also finds peace, purpose and meaning in it too. I think where I slightly came unstuck on a purely personal level is that, at one point, she acknowledges that she belongs to one of the most oppressive organisations in the world. And while it’s not for me to, like, judge either real people or fictional ones for their choices I kind of wanted to know more about how she reconciled that or, for that matter, didn’t reconcile that. Just having the quiet bit said out loud in the actual narration kind of a drew attention to an elephant in the room I would otherwise have politely ignored for the sake of the story.
I don’t think it helped that I couldn’t tell whether I was supposed to think Sister Holiday was a good sleuth or a bad one, somewhere in the middle, or if it mattered at all. She tells us that she’s sleuth and does, indeed, notice a few pieces of evidence the police—who may or may not be useless—miss. But she also tampers with crime scenes and evidence, doesn’t follow up on obvious leads, fails to really put anything together and works out what’s going by what feels like sheer chance (divine intervention?) at the end.
I should also probably mention that is, you know, terribly gritty. Violence, sexual violence, addiction, homophobia, oppression and alienation of all kinds: I honestly got so, no pun intended, burned out on it all that I kind of stopped feeling anything by the halfway point and had become so unshockable that even the final revelation of what led Sister Holiday to become a nun came across as overwrought to the point of absurdity. I mean, it was thematic, yes. But also, wait, what? You did what?
The other thing that occasionally sort of caught me off guard—though it shouldn’t have—was what came across to me as Sister Holiday’s very .. binarist, I suppose, view of men and women. I know her god is a ‘they’ but she speaks of men and women in very absolute terms throughout the book.
Men fucked like grammar schoolteachers diagramming sentences: This goes here, and now that goes there. I’d rather die than be restrained by a dude. But women were unpredictable, like trying to tame a flame.
Or
God is perfection, even in devastation. This might be the only thing I’m sure of: God is especially alive in women.
I’m not saying this is wrong or bad. I have queer friends who talk like this too. It’s just—as someone who sort of dwells in the middle of things as fluidly as possible—it is personally confusing to me. On top of which I really hate the fact that the current cultural context has made it impossible to take this kind of discourse at face value. Although let me emphasise that it is not the discourse in itself that is the problem; it is the way TERFism has positioned itself, or been positioned, relative to feminism. In any case, this is very much a your mileage my vary type situation and—given how far out of my lane I am right now—I would like to return to my car.
Oh, and I learned it’s very hot in New Orleans and everybody is sweating constantly.
Anyway: complicated feelings for a complicated book.
March 23, 2023
3.5 Stars
I enjoyed reading a mystery novel from a distinctive female protagonist. I loved the idea of a queer, liberal nun, although my experience with the Catholic church made it hard for me to believe such an individual exists.
Since her current life is in the sisterhood, a lot of the story involves flashbacks to her more risqué, sexualy active past. I thought these parts were necessary for fleshing out the character and understanding who she is as a person.
As for the mystery, it was a compelling setup but it didn't fully hold my interest all the way to the end of the story. I think this novel would have benefited from being a bit shorter.
I would recommend this to readers looking for a diverse mystery with a particularly unique amatuer detective.
Disclaimer I received a copy of this book from the publisher.
I enjoyed reading a mystery novel from a distinctive female protagonist. I loved the idea of a queer, liberal nun, although my experience with the Catholic church made it hard for me to believe such an individual exists.
Since her current life is in the sisterhood, a lot of the story involves flashbacks to her more risqué, sexualy active past. I thought these parts were necessary for fleshing out the character and understanding who she is as a person.
As for the mystery, it was a compelling setup but it didn't fully hold my interest all the way to the end of the story. I think this novel would have benefited from being a bit shorter.
I would recommend this to readers looking for a diverse mystery with a particularly unique amatuer detective.
Disclaimer I received a copy of this book from the publisher.
December 5, 2022
As seen on www.mysteryandsuspense.com
“Scorched Grace” is the debut novel by author Margot Douaihy and the first publication from Gillian Flynn (author of “Gone Girl”). A powerful story about religion and sin, family, and secrets so powerful they are literally buried in the ashes.
Sister Holiday is a novitiate at the Sisters of Sublime Blood convent, trying to instill in her students her love of music and the healing power of prayer. She is also a chain smoking, heavily tattooed member of the LGBTQ community, information she tries to keep a secret from her students, as she looks for a place to belong. Somewhere in their midst, however, an arsonist blooms, as one by one, school buildings are set on fire. After the loss of two of her close friends in these devastating fires, Holiday decides to rely on her previous skills and help the police find out who’s behind these devious acts. Hoping for redemption of her own, Sister Holiday must make amends with her own past before laying blame.
“Scorched Grace” is a unique and emotional novel, set against the backdrop of New Orleans in all of its sticky, sweaty heat and unrelenting beauty and charm. Douaihy reveals Holiday’s past slowly and teasingly, through snippets told in Holiday’s own words, as she helps the police investigate the crimes taking place at her home. Holiday blows all stereotypes out of the water, as she is the last person anyone would expect to see as a nun and the sisters of the convent are constantly fighting against the male-dominated Diocese to keep its community afloat, confronting major issues like religion and sexism head on.
Holiday is relatable in every way. Torn apart by a past of dysfunction and chaos, Holiday is smart, modern, and acerbic in all the best ways. Bitter yet desperate to see the world in a positive light, Holiday brings hope to a dark and grieving world. Her colleagues, both of the religious order and not, are devastatingly human and their vices and grievances only made them more likable.
As the quest for the arsonist continues, Douaihy makes every character suspect. Each police officer, teacher and even the nuns themselves have secrets they are desperate to keep, and “Grace” is a constant guessing game from the first page. When the ending hits, it is delightfully unexpected, bringing all of the plots twists and turns to one satisfying finale.
“Scorched Grace” has all of the makings of an award winning novel, and I see Douaihy skyrocketing to fame. Her novel is similar to creative, renowned works by authors like Douglas Stuart, and Douaihy’s unique and modern writing should receive similar accolades. “Grace” has the potential to take the novel into a sequel, and possibly a series, and I really hope Douaihy brings more Sister Holiday to the world soon!
“Scorched Grace” is the debut novel by author Margot Douaihy and the first publication from Gillian Flynn (author of “Gone Girl”). A powerful story about religion and sin, family, and secrets so powerful they are literally buried in the ashes.
Sister Holiday is a novitiate at the Sisters of Sublime Blood convent, trying to instill in her students her love of music and the healing power of prayer. She is also a chain smoking, heavily tattooed member of the LGBTQ community, information she tries to keep a secret from her students, as she looks for a place to belong. Somewhere in their midst, however, an arsonist blooms, as one by one, school buildings are set on fire. After the loss of two of her close friends in these devastating fires, Holiday decides to rely on her previous skills and help the police find out who’s behind these devious acts. Hoping for redemption of her own, Sister Holiday must make amends with her own past before laying blame.
“Scorched Grace” is a unique and emotional novel, set against the backdrop of New Orleans in all of its sticky, sweaty heat and unrelenting beauty and charm. Douaihy reveals Holiday’s past slowly and teasingly, through snippets told in Holiday’s own words, as she helps the police investigate the crimes taking place at her home. Holiday blows all stereotypes out of the water, as she is the last person anyone would expect to see as a nun and the sisters of the convent are constantly fighting against the male-dominated Diocese to keep its community afloat, confronting major issues like religion and sexism head on.
Holiday is relatable in every way. Torn apart by a past of dysfunction and chaos, Holiday is smart, modern, and acerbic in all the best ways. Bitter yet desperate to see the world in a positive light, Holiday brings hope to a dark and grieving world. Her colleagues, both of the religious order and not, are devastatingly human and their vices and grievances only made them more likable.
As the quest for the arsonist continues, Douaihy makes every character suspect. Each police officer, teacher and even the nuns themselves have secrets they are desperate to keep, and “Grace” is a constant guessing game from the first page. When the ending hits, it is delightfully unexpected, bringing all of the plots twists and turns to one satisfying finale.
“Scorched Grace” has all of the makings of an award winning novel, and I see Douaihy skyrocketing to fame. Her novel is similar to creative, renowned works by authors like Douglas Stuart, and Douaihy’s unique and modern writing should receive similar accolades. “Grace” has the potential to take the novel into a sequel, and possibly a series, and I really hope Douaihy brings more Sister Holiday to the world soon!
February 19, 2024
Apparently air travel is the preferred mode of transportation for the faithful to spread the word because I rarely see a nun in a habit these days and when I do it's always at the airport. I then stare at them as if they are some kind of anomomily. I even asked my husband, Did you see those nuns in habits? Then I tell those at my destination, Hey, I saw nuns in habits at the airport! One would think I had just encountered a few Cylons straight out of Battlestar Galactica, the great Edward James Olmos version and one of the best tv shows ever to hit the airwaves.
But I digress...
So with my rather unusual fascination for these ladies in the black frock, I had to read this book about Sister Holiday a queer, tatted-up, cigarette smoking nun with a potty mouth and a knack for crime-solving.
So what makes Sister Holiday tick? I'm still not clear on that.
The story itself, a someone or someones are committing arson at St. Sabastian's school. Deaths occur and now maybe murder too?
This takes place in New Orleans so everybody is sweating all the time page after page after page. Also, for some reason, there seems to be an exorbitant amount of bad breath going on here page after page after page.
I did not realize that these two things went hand in hand. Again, I digress...
The story itself was okay.
I'm not sure I understood the motive of the crime just as I'm not totally clear on why Sister Holiday is a nun.
I feel like I need to read the next book to figure out how I feel about this book.
There's potential here. Hopefully, I'll find it in the next installment. C'mon Sister Holiday, give me a renegade nun to root for!
But I digress...
So with my rather unusual fascination for these ladies in the black frock, I had to read this book about Sister Holiday a queer, tatted-up, cigarette smoking nun with a potty mouth and a knack for crime-solving.
So what makes Sister Holiday tick? I'm still not clear on that.
The story itself, a someone or someones are committing arson at St. Sabastian's school. Deaths occur and now maybe murder too?
This takes place in New Orleans so everybody is sweating all the time page after page after page. Also, for some reason, there seems to be an exorbitant amount of bad breath going on here page after page after page.
I did not realize that these two things went hand in hand. Again, I digress...
The story itself was okay.
I'm not sure I understood the motive of the crime just as I'm not totally clear on why Sister Holiday is a nun.
I feel like I need to read the next book to figure out how I feel about this book.
There's potential here. Hopefully, I'll find it in the next installment. C'mon Sister Holiday, give me a renegade nun to root for!
April 18, 2023
Everybody's sweating. All the time.
March 20, 2023
Feeling a little betrayed by Gillian Flynn rn
April 22, 2023
April 22, 2023 Update The Poisoned Pen Bookstore YouTube channel is hosting a discussion with 'Scorched Grace' author Margot Douaihy and her publisher Gillian Flynn tonight at 19:00 hours. You can watch it live here (it should also be recorded for archived viewing afterwards).
Queer Nun On the Run
Review of the Zando audiobook (Feb. 21, 2023) released simultaneously with the Gillian Flynn Books hardcover (Feb. 21, 2023).
[3.5 rounded up]
This seems to be a month for celebrity writer imprints. I recently read I'll Stop the World the first book from Mindy Kaling's Mindy's Book Studio and here we also have the first book from Gillian Flynn Books. The two books make for quite a contrast, one being a YA mystery and the other a queer noir.
Tattooed, chain-smoking, lesbian punk rock guitarist Holiday Walsh from Brooklyn, NY is seeking redemption for her past. That is a backstory which you will only gradually discover during Scorched Grace. You meet her first as Sister Holiday of the Sisters of the Sublime Blood, and as the music teacher at Saint Sebastian’s Catholic School in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Illustration for the NYTimes Book Review of 'Scorched Grace', see Link below.
An arsonist is setting fires at Saint Sebastian's and it seems as if Sister Holiday is being set up as the scapegoat with her personal effects being scattered at the ignition sites. Her place of refuge is under attack and it appears to be an inside job and her instinct is to both clear her name and to uncover the culprit. She faces uncooperative authorities in both her nun colleagues and the police & fire departments.
The New Orleans story alternates with Holiday's back story in Brooklyn, New York where she was a guitarist in a punk rock band and in a relationship with Nina, another member. Holiday has a stormy relationship with her parents (a police chief & a former nun) and her partner. It all leads to a tragedy from which she has to escape and for which she seeks to do penance, taking her to New Orleans.
I have to say that tension and suspense of the present day investigation was somewhat sidelined by the drama of the backstory with which it kept toggling back and forth. As this was an origin and introductory book, it was hard to escape that. Author Douaihy has certainly built an interesting character though and I look forward to further stories.
The narration by Mara Wilson was excellent in all voices, and although it avoided the authenticity of a Brooklyn accent (except for a bit for the father), I think that was for the best. A whole book in Brooklynese might get a bit tiresome.
I read/listened to Scorched Grace thanks to an enthusiastic review by GR friend Barbara.
Other Reviews
A Nun With Very Bad Habits, by Sarah Weinman, New York Times, February 10, 2023.
Scorched Grace, by Erin Clemence, Mystery and Suspense, December 4, 2022.
Trivia and Links
There is an article you can read about Why Gillian Flynn launched her book imprint with a Debut Noir about a Rebel Nun, by Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2023.
Scorched Grace is listed as the first in an expected series of Sister Holiday Mysteries. The second book is tentatively titled as Blessed Water (not yet listed on Goodreads, possible 2024 release?).
Scorched Grace has also been optioned for a TV adaptation and you can watch for updates on that at IMDb.
Queer Nun On the Run
Review of the Zando audiobook (Feb. 21, 2023) released simultaneously with the Gillian Flynn Books hardcover (Feb. 21, 2023).
[3.5 rounded up]
This seems to be a month for celebrity writer imprints. I recently read I'll Stop the World the first book from Mindy Kaling's Mindy's Book Studio and here we also have the first book from Gillian Flynn Books. The two books make for quite a contrast, one being a YA mystery and the other a queer noir.
Tattooed, chain-smoking, lesbian punk rock guitarist Holiday Walsh from Brooklyn, NY is seeking redemption for her past. That is a backstory which you will only gradually discover during Scorched Grace. You meet her first as Sister Holiday of the Sisters of the Sublime Blood, and as the music teacher at Saint Sebastian’s Catholic School in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Illustration for the NYTimes Book Review of 'Scorched Grace', see Link below.
An arsonist is setting fires at Saint Sebastian's and it seems as if Sister Holiday is being set up as the scapegoat with her personal effects being scattered at the ignition sites. Her place of refuge is under attack and it appears to be an inside job and her instinct is to both clear her name and to uncover the culprit. She faces uncooperative authorities in both her nun colleagues and the police & fire departments.
The New Orleans story alternates with Holiday's back story in Brooklyn, New York where she was a guitarist in a punk rock band and in a relationship with Nina, another member. Holiday has a stormy relationship with her parents (a police chief & a former nun) and her partner. It all leads to a tragedy from which she has to escape and for which she seeks to do penance, taking her to New Orleans.
I have to say that tension and suspense of the present day investigation was somewhat sidelined by the drama of the backstory with which it kept toggling back and forth. As this was an origin and introductory book, it was hard to escape that. Author Douaihy has certainly built an interesting character though and I look forward to further stories.
The narration by Mara Wilson was excellent in all voices, and although it avoided the authenticity of a Brooklyn accent (except for a bit for the father), I think that was for the best. A whole book in Brooklynese might get a bit tiresome.
I read/listened to Scorched Grace thanks to an enthusiastic review by GR friend Barbara.
Other Reviews
A Nun With Very Bad Habits, by Sarah Weinman, New York Times, February 10, 2023.
Scorched Grace, by Erin Clemence, Mystery and Suspense, December 4, 2022.
Trivia and Links
There is an article you can read about Why Gillian Flynn launched her book imprint with a Debut Noir about a Rebel Nun, by Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2023.
Scorched Grace is listed as the first in an expected series of Sister Holiday Mysteries. The second book is tentatively titled as Blessed Water (not yet listed on Goodreads, possible 2024 release?).
Scorched Grace has also been optioned for a TV adaptation and you can watch for updates on that at IMDb.
April 11, 2023
When I got the opportunity to listen to an ALC of a mystery novel featuring a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun as our amateur sleuth, I snapped it up. Scorched Grace sounded irreverent, dark, and unique, and I couldn't wait to see what was in store for Sister Holiday.
But as I began to listen, I started to feel that tell-tale itching at the back of my brain that always comes along when I sense a book won't work for me.
The real selling point of this novel is its protagonist, and Sister Holiday wasn't my cup of tea. Perhaps my impression was unduly influenced by the acting choices of the narrator, but she came across very pretentious and inauthentic, like a high schooler trying to be edgy. The setup of her character as a known amateur detective felt hamfisted, and her dynamic with the actual detective could have been better.
I didn't love spending time in our protagonist's head, both because of the stream-of-consciousness writing style and because of the way she thought about the people in her life (primarily her brother and the consequences of his sexual assault and the bisexuality of the woman she loves (which is framed as her not being able to make up her mind and being a cheater - two pervasive and harmful stereotypes about bisexual people)).
The mystery itself wasn't nearly as engaging as I had hoped, and what I had assumed to be the work's central theme (the conflict between the LGBTQIA+ community and organized religion, especially Catholicism) was barely addressed, despite a plethora of opportunities to do so.
For a book with such a strong concept and unique voice, it fell quite flat.
Trigger/Content Warnings: rape, violence, homophobia, use of homophobic slurs, arson, death, fire injury, victim blaming, biphobia, infidelity, pedophilia, incest, suicide, burning alive, cancer
Thank you to NetGalley, Zando, and Gillian Flynn Books for an Advance Listener Copy.
You can find me on...
Youtube | Instagram | TikTok
You can join our book club over on Patreon...
PBB Book Club
But as I began to listen, I started to feel that tell-tale itching at the back of my brain that always comes along when I sense a book won't work for me.
The real selling point of this novel is its protagonist, and Sister Holiday wasn't my cup of tea. Perhaps my impression was unduly influenced by the acting choices of the narrator, but she came across very pretentious and inauthentic, like a high schooler trying to be edgy. The setup of her character as a known amateur detective felt hamfisted, and her dynamic with the actual detective could have been better.
I didn't love spending time in our protagonist's head, both because of the stream-of-consciousness writing style and because of the way she thought about the people in her life (primarily her brother and the consequences of his sexual assault and the bisexuality of the woman she loves (which is framed as her not being able to make up her mind and being a cheater - two pervasive and harmful stereotypes about bisexual people)).
The mystery itself wasn't nearly as engaging as I had hoped, and what I had assumed to be the work's central theme (the conflict between the LGBTQIA+ community and organized religion, especially Catholicism) was barely addressed, despite a plethora of opportunities to do so.
For a book with such a strong concept and unique voice, it fell quite flat.
Trigger/Content Warnings: rape, violence, homophobia, use of homophobic slurs, arson, death, fire injury, victim blaming, biphobia, infidelity, pedophilia, incest, suicide, burning alive, cancer
Thank you to NetGalley, Zando, and Gillian Flynn Books for an Advance Listener Copy.
You can find me on...
Youtube | Instagram | TikTok
You can join our book club over on Patreon...
PBB Book Club
January 24, 2024
When I first picked up Scorched Grace, the book blurb immediately grabbed my attention: the main character is a queer, profanity-slinging, tatted-up, reformed rocker who cleans up to become the most extreme opposite of her previous self to atone for her innumerable sins. She becomes a morally grey Nun with a hilarious propensity for internal conflict over being good or getting into trouble. Her more pious side thankfully loses this struggle most often, and what does not help her situation is the fact that she seems to be a magnet for trouble. I honestly thought Sister Holiday was going to be my new favorite crime-fighting, chain-smoking, inner demon-slaying sleuth, but as I got to reading beyond the blurb on the book sleeve, I lamentably realized Sister Holiday's rising star power was quickly plummeting.
The most significant problem I came across had to do with the couple of medical scenes in the book. Having a medical background of course gives me the upper hand here, but the way the scenes were written left me feeling like the pathophysiology behind the disease or injury was very misunderstood and therefore poorly executed in the story. To be very targeted so as not to give anything away, severe smoke inhalation is not something you can usually bounce back from immediately, and you cannot give a diabetic more insulin during a hypoglycemic episode, unless death is the desired outcome.
Frustratingly, I felt like Sister Holiday was blundering about causing as much trouble as she was finding, and still equally clueless as the rest of the characters on figuring out who committed arson and murder. Bodies were piling up and Sister Holiday appeared to be on her own sort of holiday from hell, bless her heart. If she made any case-cracking, divine revelations earlier on in the book, I certainly didn’t pick up anything, except scattered clues and increasing suspicion towards everyone at the school.
This appears to be one of the first books for this author, so I have high hopes for future publications. It was an awesome idea delivered in a not so awesome package this time around.
The most significant problem I came across had to do with the couple of medical scenes in the book. Having a medical background of course gives me the upper hand here, but the way the scenes were written left me feeling like the pathophysiology behind the disease or injury was very misunderstood and therefore poorly executed in the story. To be very targeted so as not to give anything away, severe smoke inhalation is not something you can usually bounce back from immediately, and you cannot give a diabetic more insulin during a hypoglycemic episode, unless death is the desired outcome.
Frustratingly, I felt like Sister Holiday was blundering about causing as much trouble as she was finding, and still equally clueless as the rest of the characters on figuring out who committed arson and murder. Bodies were piling up and Sister Holiday appeared to be on her own sort of holiday from hell, bless her heart. If she made any case-cracking, divine revelations earlier on in the book, I certainly didn’t pick up anything, except scattered clues and increasing suspicion towards everyone at the school.
This appears to be one of the first books for this author, so I have high hopes for future publications. It was an awesome idea delivered in a not so awesome package this time around.
April 15, 2023
With a nun more likely to utter expletives than pray to the Lord, who prefers chain-smoking cigarettes in a back alley to attending her Catholic school’s staff meetings, who formerly was a queer punk rock-playing guitarist with tattoos all over her body (make no mistake, she is still extremely queer and the tats are also still there), now a black-clad Sister living and working in a convent in New Orleans, and only slightly addicted to sleuthing and solving crimes, Scorched Grace had all the makings of an unputdownable whodunnit. After all, who can resist such an exciting premise? But when I had finished the novel, all I was left with was a feeling of “well, that was weird, and not the good kind of weird.”
After a horrendous fire breaks out on the grounds of Saint Sebastian School, Sister Holiday, a self-appointed amateur sleuth, takes it upon herself to find the culprit. After all, they didn’t only burn down the whole east wing, but with two students seriously wounded and one of the janitors left for dead, the attacker must be stopped. Even more so when Sister Holiday has to concede that the police are helpless, and the fires are spreading…
For all that it was promoted as “a fast-paced and punchy whodunnit that will keep readers guessing until the very end”, I couldn’t stand just how little sleuthing Sister Holiday was actually doing. The book opens with how “[t]he devil isn’t in the details. Evil thrives in blind spots. In absence, negative space, like the haze of a sleight-of-hand trick”, only for us to 1) learn that Sister Holiday (kick-ass name, btw) learnt all her sleuthing techniques from watching crime dramas on TV and 2) to see that her “sleuthing” consisted of nothing but repeatedly asking suspects where they were the night of the fire(s) and getting no answers, finding clues that either the police had already found or that ended up not contributing to the investigation in a way that mattered, and returning to the scene of the crime several times only to find nothing.
All in all, I think I prefer a sleuthing character who is either a proper detective/private investigator or a person who acts based on nothing but curiosity and wit, such as the characters from Richard Oseman’s “The Thursday Murder Club” or Robert Thorogood's “The Marlow Murder Club”.
Now, while I thought the supporting cast of characters was relatively flat – at the end of the novel, we literally have the villain give their James Bond-esque monologue of “I’m-the-super-bad-villain-who-fooled-you-all-so-I’ll-now-reveal-my-very-intricate-and-complex-master-plan” – I thought that the scorching-hot setting of New Orleans in the summer almost made for a character in its own right. Douaihy never fails to stress and impress upon her readers the brutality of the heat, making it clear from the first page that this city’s environment is not to be trifled with.
“The air was thicky and gritty, like it wanted to bare-knuckle fight. Sticky heat, typical in New Orleans, but worse that day. The sun, the swollen red of a mosquito bite. Slow simmer belying the violence of the boil.”
Consequently, every one of these characters is sweating profusely. All the time. While some reviewers mentioned they were peeved about the author’s regular descriptions of bodily fluids and odour, I couldn’t have been less bothered. I think that in YA, fantasy, and modern fiction anyway, if they don’t happen to be involved with sex, bodies are written and described as way too sanitised. Kudos to Douaihy for writing characters that have annoying, but very human and biologically natural reactions.
Writing about the city and the heat is one thing, the writing style in general a whole other thing. On her website, the author states that “[r]aw, visceral, lush, obsessed – [her] lines are crafted to inject immediacy while simultaneously masking slow boils.” This certainly holds true for this novel, the immediacy of the narrative style showing in Sister Holiday’s constant stream of consciousness, which jumps around, leaving you at once disjointed, disorientated, and displaced. There is an urgency to the way her character thinks and feels, but where it’s almost too much in one place, it lacks in another. Never did I feel like the plot, or our “sleuthing” Sister, was progressing with the urgency I felt the case required. All the while, I continued feeling oppressed by the writing style that at times felt so heavy, I felt I couldn’t breathe.
Heavy are also the topics discussed – and sometimes instantly dropped again – in this novel. There are trigger warnings in abundance, most notably: queer trauma and abuse. Reading about these topics doesn’t trigger me but this is where I like to say that Trauma. Doesn’t. Make. Character. I don’t care what you put your characters through, I’ll read it. But give me a reason why you put them through excruciating pain laden with homophobic acts of violence resulting in life-long trauma. I need to see why. I won’t give a damn about your character only because you are telling me what horrible things they went through. Turn their trauma into something that propels the story or someone’s character development forward. Give me a reason to feel angry about it happening to them in the first place instead of just being angry about the act of rape, abuse, or violence itself.
This novel’s set-up sounded so fierce, and the title is undoubtedly a banger, it is so spot-on!, but the execution of the whodunnit mystery left me cold. In the end, I didn’t very much care to find out who the culprit was. I loved the idea of the protagonist, of her being a lesbian nun who is so devotedly, so unironically religious, and a believer even though her Sisters and Brothers condemn, abuse, terrorise, and demonise queer people like her. This dichotomy is what I would have loved to read more about instead of a rather trying and tiring whodunnit which, in essence, plays out like your average ITV crime drama, with stereotypical red herrings and archetypal villain behaviour.
As always, thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for granting me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
After a horrendous fire breaks out on the grounds of Saint Sebastian School, Sister Holiday, a self-appointed amateur sleuth, takes it upon herself to find the culprit. After all, they didn’t only burn down the whole east wing, but with two students seriously wounded and one of the janitors left for dead, the attacker must be stopped. Even more so when Sister Holiday has to concede that the police are helpless, and the fires are spreading…
For all that it was promoted as “a fast-paced and punchy whodunnit that will keep readers guessing until the very end”, I couldn’t stand just how little sleuthing Sister Holiday was actually doing. The book opens with how “[t]he devil isn’t in the details. Evil thrives in blind spots. In absence, negative space, like the haze of a sleight-of-hand trick”, only for us to 1) learn that Sister Holiday (kick-ass name, btw) learnt all her sleuthing techniques from watching crime dramas on TV and 2) to see that her “sleuthing” consisted of nothing but repeatedly asking suspects where they were the night of the fire(s) and getting no answers, finding clues that either the police had already found or that ended up not contributing to the investigation in a way that mattered, and returning to the scene of the crime several times only to find nothing.
All in all, I think I prefer a sleuthing character who is either a proper detective/private investigator or a person who acts based on nothing but curiosity and wit, such as the characters from Richard Oseman’s “The Thursday Murder Club” or Robert Thorogood's “The Marlow Murder Club”.
Now, while I thought the supporting cast of characters was relatively flat – at the end of the novel, we literally have the villain give their James Bond-esque monologue of “I’m-the-super-bad-villain-who-fooled-you-all-so-I’ll-now-reveal-my-very-intricate-and-complex-master-plan” – I thought that the scorching-hot setting of New Orleans in the summer almost made for a character in its own right. Douaihy never fails to stress and impress upon her readers the brutality of the heat, making it clear from the first page that this city’s environment is not to be trifled with.
“The air was thicky and gritty, like it wanted to bare-knuckle fight. Sticky heat, typical in New Orleans, but worse that day. The sun, the swollen red of a mosquito bite. Slow simmer belying the violence of the boil.”
Consequently, every one of these characters is sweating profusely. All the time. While some reviewers mentioned they were peeved about the author’s regular descriptions of bodily fluids and odour, I couldn’t have been less bothered. I think that in YA, fantasy, and modern fiction anyway, if they don’t happen to be involved with sex, bodies are written and described as way too sanitised. Kudos to Douaihy for writing characters that have annoying, but very human and biologically natural reactions.
Writing about the city and the heat is one thing, the writing style in general a whole other thing. On her website, the author states that “[r]aw, visceral, lush, obsessed – [her] lines are crafted to inject immediacy while simultaneously masking slow boils.” This certainly holds true for this novel, the immediacy of the narrative style showing in Sister Holiday’s constant stream of consciousness, which jumps around, leaving you at once disjointed, disorientated, and displaced. There is an urgency to the way her character thinks and feels, but where it’s almost too much in one place, it lacks in another. Never did I feel like the plot, or our “sleuthing” Sister, was progressing with the urgency I felt the case required. All the while, I continued feeling oppressed by the writing style that at times felt so heavy, I felt I couldn’t breathe.
Heavy are also the topics discussed – and sometimes instantly dropped again – in this novel. There are trigger warnings in abundance, most notably: queer trauma and abuse. Reading about these topics doesn’t trigger me but this is where I like to say that Trauma. Doesn’t. Make. Character. I don’t care what you put your characters through, I’ll read it. But give me a reason why you put them through excruciating pain laden with homophobic acts of violence resulting in life-long trauma. I need to see why. I won’t give a damn about your character only because you are telling me what horrible things they went through. Turn their trauma into something that propels the story or someone’s character development forward. Give me a reason to feel angry about it happening to them in the first place instead of just being angry about the act of rape, abuse, or violence itself.
This novel’s set-up sounded so fierce, and the title is undoubtedly a banger, it is so spot-on!, but the execution of the whodunnit mystery left me cold. In the end, I didn’t very much care to find out who the culprit was. I loved the idea of the protagonist, of her being a lesbian nun who is so devotedly, so unironically religious, and a believer even though her Sisters and Brothers condemn, abuse, terrorise, and demonise queer people like her. This dichotomy is what I would have loved to read more about instead of a rather trying and tiring whodunnit which, in essence, plays out like your average ITV crime drama, with stereotypical red herrings and archetypal villain behaviour.
As always, thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for granting me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
March 18, 2023
Thanks to Zando through Net Galley who allowed me to listen to the audio version of this book.
This is Margot Douaihy’s first novel, and I think she has the potential to write some great books in the future. However, I felt that the book had both major and minor issues.
I really wanted to like this book. I thought the cover was cool and I liked the beginning of the book’s description. But the premise of the book turned out to be unbelievable, and something very different from what I thought it was going to be.
Holiday, a young, openly queer woman who had so far lived an uninhibited life of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll decides to become a Catholic nun. No reason is given to explain how or why Holiday made the decision until near the end of the book. Even after learning about the event that pushed her to become a nun, it still doesn’t make sense to me.
After reading the description of the book I assumed that it would have to be science fiction of some sort. Either it would be set in the future in a time when Holiday’s beliefs had been accepted by the Catholic Church, or I thought it would be set in an alternate world where those things were sanctioned. If this had been the case, I think it would have been a much better book.
Throughout the beginning of the book I kept waiting for the sci-fi element, but it didn’t come. However, there wasn’t an explanation for how Holiday could be who she was and believe all of the things she believed while submitting to the rule of intolerant men who run the Catholic Church. It was very disorienting to try and understand what the author was trying to do and try to find some way in my mind for the book to make sense. For me, that feeling never went away.
It turns out that this book is set in our actual world and in the present day. And this is not a cheesy, conservative Christian redemption story (nor would I want it to be). She doesn’t convert and give up her old ways and beliefs and become a traditional Christian of any sort. Holiday subscribes to almost no Catholic teachings. To her, God is “They”, not a person, and is “all of us”. She is proudly queer. She is a feminist who hates the patriarchy. Given all of that, it is inconceivable (in today’s society) that such a person would become a nun.
So those are my problems with the premise. I also couldn’t support the main character, Holiday. The author clearly meant the book to be a modern noir mystery. In those books, the detectives aren’t necessarily supposed to be likable or “good”, so the fact Holiday is a very flawed character isn’t a problem. But noirs are generally nihilistic. In them, there is no good or evil, there is no God, the world is just a terrible place where everyone has to look after number one. The detectives are usually bad people who occasionally do some good things. However, in this book, I think the author intended Holiday to be a good person who has done some bad things. Holiday believes in God and wants to be a force for good in the world. But Holiday not only did some terrible stuff in the past, she continues to do some pretty terrible things in the present, and feels little to no remorse about it.
She is a teacher at a Catholic School, and she physically assaults one of her students. She suffers no consequences for this, and only feels a little bad about it. Holiday was not acting in self-defense, the student was just saying some terrible things. The student is 18 and a pretty bad person, but that is no excuse for what she did. She pushed him hard and he hit his head hard on an iron railing, then she started hitting him with a metal ruler.
Holiday rats on her friends to the police any time she can. Her excuse is that she has to suspect everyone, even though no one asked her to help with the investigation and she is always wrong and just causes hurt to the people she cares about. SPOILER
Holiday wasn’t a great person in the past, but there was one thing in particular that pushed me over the edge. Up until that part, I wasn’t loving the book, but I was doing my utmost to like it. But what Holiday did was so atrocious that it forfeited any good will that I had left for the book. SPOILER
LESSER THINGS I THINK COULD HAVE BEEN IMPROVED
1. One of the police officers actually says the word “question mark” at the end of asking questions near the beginning of the book. There is no explanation for why she does that, and later on in the book the police officer stops doing that without explanation.
2. The other nuns in the book don’t seem to speak like Catholics. I could be wrong about this because I didn’t grow up Catholic, but I don’t think Catholics usually say “praise Jesus”. I think that is more common in some Protestant groups.
In summary, I think this book has a lot of problems, but I would not be at all surprised if Margot Douaihy improves with more experience.
I listened to the audio version of this book and Mara Wilson was an excellent narrator.
This is Margot Douaihy’s first novel, and I think she has the potential to write some great books in the future. However, I felt that the book had both major and minor issues.
I really wanted to like this book. I thought the cover was cool and I liked the beginning of the book’s description. But the premise of the book turned out to be unbelievable, and something very different from what I thought it was going to be.
Holiday, a young, openly queer woman who had so far lived an uninhibited life of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll decides to become a Catholic nun. No reason is given to explain how or why Holiday made the decision until near the end of the book. Even after learning about the event that pushed her to become a nun, it still doesn’t make sense to me.
After reading the description of the book I assumed that it would have to be science fiction of some sort. Either it would be set in the future in a time when Holiday’s beliefs had been accepted by the Catholic Church, or I thought it would be set in an alternate world where those things were sanctioned. If this had been the case, I think it would have been a much better book.
Throughout the beginning of the book I kept waiting for the sci-fi element, but it didn’t come. However, there wasn’t an explanation for how Holiday could be who she was and believe all of the things she believed while submitting to the rule of intolerant men who run the Catholic Church. It was very disorienting to try and understand what the author was trying to do and try to find some way in my mind for the book to make sense. For me, that feeling never went away.
It turns out that this book is set in our actual world and in the present day. And this is not a cheesy, conservative Christian redemption story (nor would I want it to be). She doesn’t convert and give up her old ways and beliefs and become a traditional Christian of any sort. Holiday subscribes to almost no Catholic teachings. To her, God is “They”, not a person, and is “all of us”. She is proudly queer. She is a feminist who hates the patriarchy. Given all of that, it is inconceivable (in today’s society) that such a person would become a nun.
So those are my problems with the premise. I also couldn’t support the main character, Holiday. The author clearly meant the book to be a modern noir mystery. In those books, the detectives aren’t necessarily supposed to be likable or “good”, so the fact Holiday is a very flawed character isn’t a problem. But noirs are generally nihilistic. In them, there is no good or evil, there is no God, the world is just a terrible place where everyone has to look after number one. The detectives are usually bad people who occasionally do some good things. However, in this book, I think the author intended Holiday to be a good person who has done some bad things. Holiday believes in God and wants to be a force for good in the world. But Holiday not only did some terrible stuff in the past, she continues to do some pretty terrible things in the present, and feels little to no remorse about it.
She is a teacher at a Catholic School, and she physically assaults one of her students. She suffers no consequences for this, and only feels a little bad about it. Holiday was not acting in self-defense, the student was just saying some terrible things. The student is 18 and a pretty bad person, but that is no excuse for what she did. She pushed him hard and he hit his head hard on an iron railing, then she started hitting him with a metal ruler.
Holiday rats on her friends to the police any time she can. Her excuse is that she has to suspect everyone, even though no one asked her to help with the investigation and she is always wrong and just causes hurt to the people she cares about. SPOILER
Holiday wasn’t a great person in the past, but there was one thing in particular that pushed me over the edge. Up until that part, I wasn’t loving the book, but I was doing my utmost to like it. But what Holiday did was so atrocious that it forfeited any good will that I had left for the book. SPOILER
LESSER THINGS I THINK COULD HAVE BEEN IMPROVED
1. One of the police officers actually says the word “question mark” at the end of asking questions near the beginning of the book. There is no explanation for why she does that, and later on in the book the police officer stops doing that without explanation.
2. The other nuns in the book don’t seem to speak like Catholics. I could be wrong about this because I didn’t grow up Catholic, but I don’t think Catholics usually say “praise Jesus”. I think that is more common in some Protestant groups.
In summary, I think this book has a lot of problems, but I would not be at all surprised if Margot Douaihy improves with more experience.
I listened to the audio version of this book and Mara Wilson was an excellent narrator.
January 20, 2023
what a fucking fantastic novel. catholicism is usually not open to nor accepting of queer and trans people & punk/alt folks, but margot douaihy changes that with an iconic queer, tatted up nun who isn’t afraid to say the word “fuck.” sister holiday smokes cigs, digs chicks, and is a total badass. when a fire claims the life of a student, sister holiday sets off to discover the reasons behind the arson and who is responsible. with new orleans as the backdrop, this incredibly fun and riveting novel explores the lives of queer people living in religious spaces, and how religion does not need to have institutions based in homophobia and transphobia. douaihy also expertly tackles issues with police, who don’t seem to want to help at all.
what a beautiful novel, is really all i can say. it was fun, well paced, and full of strong characters. sister holiday has an aesthetic like no other, and everything she does oozes badassery. if you like mysteries, murder, and complex relationships with religion, this book is for you. i loved it.
thank you to netgalley and the publisher for this arc in exchange for an honest review!
what a beautiful novel, is really all i can say. it was fun, well paced, and full of strong characters. sister holiday has an aesthetic like no other, and everything she does oozes badassery. if you like mysteries, murder, and complex relationships with religion, this book is for you. i loved it.
thank you to netgalley and the publisher for this arc in exchange for an honest review!
January 9, 2023
4.5/5 A queer punk-rocker-turned-nun works to figure out who the serial arsonist in her community is. Sharp, heartbreaking, funny and full of diverse and vivid characters, I’m thrilled to know this is the start of a sleuthy series. I believe we’ve found the Agatha Christie (and Miss Marple) of our generation through Margot Douaihy and Sister Holiday.
Not only was it a fantastic mystery with a very satisfying build up and conclusion, but learning about the past Sister Holiday was running from added a ton of depth to the story. Cannot wait for the next one!
Many, many thanks to Zando for sending an advanced copy!
Not only was it a fantastic mystery with a very satisfying build up and conclusion, but learning about the past Sister Holiday was running from added a ton of depth to the story. Cannot wait for the next one!
Many, many thanks to Zando for sending an advanced copy!
March 12, 2023
3.5 stars rounded down. I'm intrigued to continue on with the series and hopefully love it more as it goes along. It has an interesting twist on the crime solving sleuth. But the crime solving it self wasn't quite a winning thing for me.
Shelved as 'dnf'
March 12, 2023DNF at 25% in. My interest in this just kept waning, I'm not entirely sure why, but I have too many books on my TBR to continue with one that isn't really doing it for me!
June 14, 2024
30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 4
Book 10/30
The ending killed my buzz a little on this one, which up until then had been extremely interesting with arresting imagery (not something I normally care about!) and an extremely unique look at modern religion, from the perspective a queer, chain-smoking, tattooed nun who was a former punk rocker until traumatic events pushed her to seek solace, as her mother did before her, in a sisterhood of fellow nuns. Plus, there is a mystery here, but honestly, it was the least interesting part of the book for me.
Also, when I say the ending killed my buzz, it's not that I didn't like what happened, but that it felt rushed. I wanted them to have spent more time leading up to it emotionally for our main character, Sister Holiday (her pre-nun name was Holiday Walsh), and then coming down from the fallout. A lot of things were left on the table as well, though some of that could be mitigated by the sequel. I think it's a fair complaint to have, though, in that this book should be able to mostly stand on its own, and several of the things not fully resolved should have been. Especially since it's my understanding that the next book has quite a time jump.
As a lapsed Catholic, I found Sister Holiday's spirituality very wholesome. She seeks solace and wisdom, wants to help others, and it's important to her that she live in a progressive convent (though one of the sisters hates her and uses her queerness against her). There was so much lovely prose about her thinking about god and her place in the world. On like page three she compares praying to a witch's spell, and I was in.
Will definitely continue this series!
Book 10/30
The ending killed my buzz a little on this one, which up until then had been extremely interesting with arresting imagery (not something I normally care about!) and an extremely unique look at modern religion, from the perspective a queer, chain-smoking, tattooed nun who was a former punk rocker until traumatic events pushed her to seek solace, as her mother did before her, in a sisterhood of fellow nuns. Plus, there is a mystery here, but honestly, it was the least interesting part of the book for me.
Also, when I say the ending killed my buzz, it's not that I didn't like what happened, but that it felt rushed. I wanted them to have spent more time leading up to it emotionally for our main character, Sister Holiday (her pre-nun name was Holiday Walsh), and then coming down from the fallout. A lot of things were left on the table as well, though some of that could be mitigated by the sequel. I think it's a fair complaint to have, though, in that this book should be able to mostly stand on its own, and several of the things not fully resolved should have been. Especially since it's my understanding that the next book has quite a time jump.
As a lapsed Catholic, I found Sister Holiday's spirituality very wholesome. She seeks solace and wisdom, wants to help others, and it's important to her that she live in a progressive convent (though one of the sisters hates her and uses her queerness against her). There was so much lovely prose about her thinking about god and her place in the world. On like page three she compares praying to a witch's spell, and I was in.
Will definitely continue this series!
June 19, 2024
So this book should have been a home-run. In theory. A sleuthing, very tattooed former punk turned nun in New Orleans. Doesn’t that just sound perfect? And look at that super cool cover art! Damn.
I have to assume that this is a ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ situation because I really struggled. I could not get invested in the mystery, I didn’t feel any particular attachment to Sister Holiday, I didn’t really care about why she was so invested in figuring out who was behind the arson. And I really think it’s me, because the book is objectively well-written – it’s not prose to fall on your knees for, but it’s solid, and clear. The weaving of the current mystery and Holiday’s backstory told in flashbacks is well executed, leaving you wondering up until the end about why this is such a big deal for her.
I just didn’t really feel invested. I found most of the characters, including but not limited to Holiday, to be annoying, abrasive and not especially interesting. I wonder if I would have felt differently had this novel been longer, if the author had taken more time to really flesh-out those characters. Maybe I would have had time to develop more complicated and nuanced feelings for them then just eye-rolling irritation. Maybe if the backstory had been explained differently and I had known why this crime touched such a nerve with our main character, I would have been more excited to watch her deal with it.
I really have no idea. And I am not sure if I am more disappointed in the book or myself in this particular case. I feel like I have gotten terribly picky, and I am sorry ‘Scorching Grace’ didn’t hit the spot. I really wanted it to.
You go ahead and read it, you’ll probably like it if you enjoy mysteries and weird main characters who aren’t terribly good at sleuthing but do it anyway.
I have to assume that this is a ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ situation because I really struggled. I could not get invested in the mystery, I didn’t feel any particular attachment to Sister Holiday, I didn’t really care about why she was so invested in figuring out who was behind the arson. And I really think it’s me, because the book is objectively well-written – it’s not prose to fall on your knees for, but it’s solid, and clear. The weaving of the current mystery and Holiday’s backstory told in flashbacks is well executed, leaving you wondering up until the end about why this is such a big deal for her.
I just didn’t really feel invested. I found most of the characters, including but not limited to Holiday, to be annoying, abrasive and not especially interesting. I wonder if I would have felt differently had this novel been longer, if the author had taken more time to really flesh-out those characters. Maybe I would have had time to develop more complicated and nuanced feelings for them then just eye-rolling irritation. Maybe if the backstory had been explained differently and I had known why this crime touched such a nerve with our main character, I would have been more excited to watch her deal with it.
I really have no idea. And I am not sure if I am more disappointed in the book or myself in this particular case. I feel like I have gotten terribly picky, and I am sorry ‘Scorching Grace’ didn’t hit the spot. I really wanted it to.
You go ahead and read it, you’ll probably like it if you enjoy mysteries and weird main characters who aren’t terribly good at sleuthing but do it anyway.
February 24, 2023
I was so here for this new amateur detective novel featuring Sister Holiday, a queer, chain-smoking, heavily tattooed former rock musician and new nun who tries to get to the bottom of a serial arsonist and murderer who seems intent on framing her. Set in New Orleans, this was a refreshing debut series and I can't wait for more books featuring this one of a kind character. Recommended for fans of Sister Act or Angeline by Anna Quinn. Much thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early audio copy in exchange for my honest review. This was excellent narrated by Mara Wilson!
February 21, 2024
this was one of my most anticipated releases for 2023 lmao but it was beyond disappointing. everything about the narration felt forced and disjointed so i didn’t really care one way or the other about the plot or what happened to the main character (pretty sure she was meant to be likeable so that’s sad). anyway. i wish i had the will power to dnf
June 21, 2023
Individually most aspects of this book should have worked for me but somehow nothing really landed as more than just ok.
January 11, 2023
Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!
A nun with full body tattoos who also smokes the cigarettes and other contraband from her students, all while starting a new reputation as super sleuth as she works on the clues for multiple fires at her convent. This story didn't need any more surprises, but it definitely kept them rolling in.
I love that this takes place in New Orleans, a perfect city for the scene of any murder/mystery. Sister Holiday has been a nun for about one year after leaving her tumultuous life behind in NYC. There are many looks into her past throughout this book, which only adds to the drama. Sister Holiday teaches at the private school attached to the convent with a few other teachers and nuns. When fires begin erupting seemingingly out of nowhere several times at this school and convent, Sister Holiday takes it upon herself to find the culprit.
This is an intriguing read that definitely kept me entertained. However, I felt like some of the characters and the interactions in this story fell a bit flat. With that said, I still couldn't put this book down!
Out February 21, 2023!
A nun with full body tattoos who also smokes the cigarettes and other contraband from her students, all while starting a new reputation as super sleuth as she works on the clues for multiple fires at her convent. This story didn't need any more surprises, but it definitely kept them rolling in.
I love that this takes place in New Orleans, a perfect city for the scene of any murder/mystery. Sister Holiday has been a nun for about one year after leaving her tumultuous life behind in NYC. There are many looks into her past throughout this book, which only adds to the drama. Sister Holiday teaches at the private school attached to the convent with a few other teachers and nuns. When fires begin erupting seemingingly out of nowhere several times at this school and convent, Sister Holiday takes it upon herself to find the culprit.
This is an intriguing read that definitely kept me entertained. However, I felt like some of the characters and the interactions in this story fell a bit flat. With that said, I still couldn't put this book down!
Out February 21, 2023!
February 25, 2023
3.5 stars rounded up.
A really fun (despite the subject matter at times), unique novel with an interesting protagonist. Loved that she was a queer nun, solid dialogue, good story. Admittedly, Holiday could have done with some intense therapy rather than joining a nunnery, but I suppose that would be a whole other novel. We all deal with trauma in our own ways, and I found this intense but believable. I will say that I cottoned on to the arsonist very early on, though I didn't know their motivation (and I still didn't fully "get" it when explained, though it was realistic in many ways).
This book was very quirky and unexpected in a lot of ways, which is why I've upped my score here. I feel like a lot of novels follow a prescribed formula that gets dull and uninspiring, but Douaihy did a great job at keeping me on my toes here.
Just to add: I can totally see this being turned into a mini-series or something. Heather Matarazzo as Holiday and Lily Tomlin as Sister Honor in my mind. Still working out the rest of the casting!
A really fun (despite the subject matter at times), unique novel with an interesting protagonist. Loved that she was a queer nun, solid dialogue, good story. Admittedly, Holiday could have done with some intense therapy rather than joining a nunnery, but I suppose that would be a whole other novel. We all deal with trauma in our own ways, and I found this intense but believable. I will say that I cottoned on to the arsonist very early on, though I didn't know their motivation (and I still didn't fully "get" it when explained, though it was realistic in many ways).
This book was very quirky and unexpected in a lot of ways, which is why I've upped my score here. I feel like a lot of novels follow a prescribed formula that gets dull and uninspiring, but Douaihy did a great job at keeping me on my toes here.
Just to add: I can totally see this being turned into a mini-series or something. Heather Matarazzo as Holiday and Lily Tomlin as Sister Honor in my mind. Still working out the rest of the casting!
June 18, 2023
3.5
Writing was a bit too lush for me at times, but a worthwhile story imo
Writing was a bit too lush for me at times, but a worthwhile story imo
April 5, 2023
Let's be real, we're all reading this for the allure of a queer, tattooed, unconventional nun. The mystery of "who set the church on fire" isn't that interesting on it's own - the characters were the real intrigue.
I expected a fresh look at Catholicism and complex character development. Instead, Sister Holiday was flat.
We get to know her through flashbacks into her alcohol and trauma fueled past, but with non of the inner dialogue and emotion that would give her depth. The things I was most curious to know - why did she become a nun? How does she feel about religion and the church as an institution? how does she reconcile her past and her identity with her new religious role? - were never answered in any satisfying way.
The side characters were laughably flat. I couldn't tell the other nuns apart (Sister who?) and the detectives suffered from the bumbling, incompetent policeman trope (one detective quite literally asks questions by ending the sentence with "question mark" spoken out loud. Insufferable.) This alone makes the thriller/whodunnit component entirely uninteresting since each suspect is poorly rendered. There was no teasing out the psychology or analyzing the mannerisms - it was purely circumstantial evidence (a glove was left here, was this person actually walking their dog during the crime) that drove the "mystery".
The plot could have been really compelling - Sister Holiday's past, the awful things she did and was subject to, and the murders and ending of the book all sound interesting on paper. They were unfortunately skimmed over - the most traumatic and defining event of Sister Holiday's past was described in half a page and hardly revisited. There was zero emotional impact where there should have been (an ex lover re-emerging, the death of a fellow nun... I should have felt something.) Instead we linger on insignificant details which I assume is to create atmosphere, but just feels boring (extensively describing the heat/sweat/grime of NOLA, step by step descriptions of going from one place to another, sometimes entire pages and chapters devoted to this sort of description only to get a paragraph about the TRAUMA!?)
Had I not spent $27 on this hardcover I would have DNF'd. Add this to the pile of "great idea, terrible execution."
I expected a fresh look at Catholicism and complex character development. Instead, Sister Holiday was flat.
We get to know her through flashbacks into her alcohol and trauma fueled past, but with non of the inner dialogue and emotion that would give her depth. The things I was most curious to know - why did she become a nun? How does she feel about religion and the church as an institution? how does she reconcile her past and her identity with her new religious role? - were never answered in any satisfying way.
The side characters were laughably flat. I couldn't tell the other nuns apart (Sister who?) and the detectives suffered from the bumbling, incompetent policeman trope (one detective quite literally asks questions by ending the sentence with "question mark" spoken out loud. Insufferable.) This alone makes the thriller/whodunnit component entirely uninteresting since each suspect is poorly rendered. There was no teasing out the psychology or analyzing the mannerisms - it was purely circumstantial evidence (a glove was left here, was this person actually walking their dog during the crime) that drove the "mystery".
The plot could have been really compelling - Sister Holiday's past, the awful things she did and was subject to, and the murders and ending of the book all sound interesting on paper. They were unfortunately skimmed over - the most traumatic and defining event of Sister Holiday's past was described in half a page and hardly revisited. There was zero emotional impact where there should have been (an ex lover re-emerging, the death of a fellow nun... I should have felt something.) Instead we linger on insignificant details which I assume is to create atmosphere, but just feels boring (extensively describing the heat/sweat/grime of NOLA, step by step descriptions of going from one place to another, sometimes entire pages and chapters devoted to this sort of description only to get a paragraph about the TRAUMA!?)
Had I not spent $27 on this hardcover I would have DNF'd. Add this to the pile of "great idea, terrible execution."
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