Are you a fan of memoirs? Me, meh, not so much. So when I was offered a chance to join the bookstagram campaign for Little Sister by Patricia Walsh Chadwick I won’t lie, I was a bit hesitant. So then I looked it up and saw the reviews were phenomenal, I mean unreal, so I gave it a chance. Let me tell you I am officially sold on memoirs now. This one just blew me away. You need to read this. Memoir lover or not, this is a book not to pass up.
Here is the synopsis:
Imagine an eighteen-year-old American girl who has never read a newspaper, watched television, or made a phone call. An eighteen-year-old-girl who has never danced—and this in the 1960s.
It is in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Leonard Feeney, a controversial (soon to be excommunicated) Catholic priest, has founded a religious community called the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Center’s members—many of them educated at Harvard and Radcliffe—surrender all earthly possessions and aspects of their life, including their children, to him. Patricia Chadwick was one of those children, and Little Sister is her account of growing up in the Feeney sect.
Separated from her parents and forbidden to speak to them, Patricia bristles against the community’s draconian rules, yearning for another life. When, at seventeen, she is banished from the Center, her home, she faces the world alone, without skills, family, or money but empowered with faith and a fierce determination to succeed on her own, which she does, rising eventually to the upper echelons of the world of finance and investing.
A tale of resilience and grace, Little Sister chronicles, in riveting prose, a surreal childhood and does so without rancor or self-pity.
Don’t pass this one up.
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