And young Marie isn’t just there to be a nun, but to be the prioress, the head nun. The abbey is extremely impoverished (many of the nuns are literally starving to death), and they are fresh off an outbreak of some sort of plague-ish thing that cut their numbers significantly. This book takes place in the 12th century during the rule of Eleanor of Aquitane, who banishes our main character, Marie ( a fictionalized portrayal of Marie de France) to an abbey to get her unruly and unwanted presence out of court. It’s like, how many reasons are there why a woman would be shut away, married off to God, and then spend the rest of her life wearing a fancy black hoodie and contemplating the universe? So many reasons. I think they are funny and interesting and weird, and some of them were completely demented (my mom had a nun teacher in the early 1960s who used to throw a mophead at children who annoyed her during class). I’ve had a weird thing with nuns ever since I watched The Trouble With Angels as a child, and I can’t explain it. I do, on occasion, voluntarily read lit-fic, even dare I say, get excited about it! And that is usually when there is some sort of weird hook to the premise.
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