She helps in the kitchen with Sister Evangeline and changes her mind about giving up her baby. She goes to this Catholic house which was a former hotel but now run by nuns for unwed mothers, intending to give away her unborn child.
He’s the best husband anyone can have and loves her very much but she is deeply unhappy and decides to run, actually drive away when she discovers that she is pregnant, leaving her poor mother and husband. Set in 1960s, the first part follows Rose growing up with her widow mother, Helen, and meets a school teacher, marries him. This book is divided into three parts and told chronologically in first person point of view from three different characters. (Out of topic, but at my last writing workshop with my MA classmates, someone said the third book is always the best for most writers. This is a reprint of her first book, which explains why I don’t find it as good as her later books, story wise, yet this book warranted a reprint when she became a best selling author. It is also clear that Rose cannot remain untouched by what she has left behind by the ever-watchful Sister Evangeline by the love of Son, the handyman at St Elizabeth's or later by the birth of her daughter, Cecilia.She is one of my favourite authors and if you have been following my book reviews, you would have realised that I have read almost all her fiction. But St Elizabeth's is near a healing spring, and when Rose's time draws near, she realises that she cannot go through with her plans. Rose plans to give her baby up because she knows she cannot be the mother it needs. Nor does she tell her widowed and much-loved mother, whom she also abandons in penance for leaving her marriage. She is pregnant but also married (although at St Elizabeth's she claims to be unwed), fleeing her dull but loving husband without telling him she is pregnant.
Rose is a young women who has decided to be 'a liar for the rest of my life'.
Rose Clinton arrives at St Elizabeth's, a Roman Catholic home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentucky. Winner of the 2002 Orange Prize for her novel, 'Bel Canto', Ann Patchett's stunning first novel is about 'pilgrimage and healing.
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