Blog Tour and Book #Review: Faith by Jennifer Haigh

About the Book:

It is the spring of 2002 and a perfect storm has hit Boston. Across the city’s archdiocese, trusted priests have been accused of the worst possible betrayal of the souls in their care. Estranged for years from her difficult and demanding family, Sheila McGann has remained close to her older brother, Art, the popular, dynamic pastor of a large suburban parish. When Art finds himself at the center of the maelstrom, Sheila returns to Boston, ready to fight for him and his reputation. But what she discovers is more complicated than she imagined as the scandal forces long-buried secrets to surface.

Elegantly crafted and sharply observed, Jennifer Haigh’s Faith is a haunting meditation on loyalty and family that demonstrates how the truth can shatter our deepest beliefs—and restore them.

About the Author:

Jennifer Haigh is the author of the New York Timesbestseller Baker Towers, winner of the 2006 PEN/L. L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author; Mrs. Kimble, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and was a finalist for the Book Sense Book of the Year; and The Condition.

Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere. She lives in the Boston area.

My Opinion:


What a book. Not easy to read by any stretch of the imagination. Excellently written. Brilliantly devised using a topic that has ripped through the headlines and convicted an entire vocation whether warranted or not. A caveat - I was raised Catholic. No, I never had knowing contact with a predator priest. Nasty, unpleasant, fire and brimstone spouting priests yes - sexually motivated, no. But back to this specific novel and not the evil perpetrated by bad priests and even worse bishops and cardinals - not that I have any strong feelings about how the whole debacle was handled....


OK. Faith, the novel. As I said, excellently written. It takes the entirety of the pedophile priest issue and brings it down to the singular. What happens when a member of your family is accused of assaulting a child. Ms. Haigh sets up the family dynamic slowly. She builds the family one member at a time by showing their back stories. Back stories that, as in most Catholic families, get buried so that most members don't even know their own histories. The priest in question is Art, brother to the narrator of the novel, Sheila, children of a truly clueless mother who refuses to see what is right in front of her face. Not that her son the priest may or may not be a child molester but that her family is falling apart and she turns a blind eye to both her past and her present.


Shelia is the force in the book. Even though it's Art's story it is Sheila that drives the telling. It is written as her memoir; she is supposedly exposing the truth about her family and about Art and the accusation against him. About why he did not fight it and why he made the choices he did. All is not as it seems in the family and like most families they don't talk to each other about difficult topics.


Given the premise you can imagine that it was not an easy story to tell. There is nothing overt about what may or may not have happened to the child. But Ms. Haigh knows where our minds will go and there is so much power in that - she lets her story fuel our imaginations. This is why I say it is brilliantly written. She knows how much or how little to write to maintain the anger against the church, the priest, the system and ourselves for letting it happen. Another great book that deserves more than one reading.




You can see the rest of the Tour Schedule HERE (All of Ms. Haigh's novels are on tour!)
You can purchase Faith on Amazon.com
You can find Jennifer Haigh on Facebook
You can go to JenniferHaigh.com

Disclosure:  I received a copy of Faith from TLC Book Tours. Any opinions expressed are my honest opinions and were not impacted by my receipt of the free book. I received no monetary compensation for this post.