Vere, Gwen, Ginny, and Win come to The Sisters of the Supreme Adoration by different paths, delivered into the rigorous and austere care of Sister Fran. Each has their own complicated, heart-breaking story that they safeguard. But together they are the all-powerful and confident The Guineveres, bound by the extraordinary coincidence of their names and girded against the indignities of their plain, sequestered lives. Together, they learn about God, history, and, despite the nuns' protestations, sex. They learn about the saints whose revival stories of faith and pain it are threaded through their own. But above all, they plot their futures, when they can leave the convent and finally find a true home. But when four comatose soldiers, casualties of the War looming outside, arrive at the convent, The Guineveres' friendship is tested in ways they never could have foreseen. In The Guineveres, Sarah Domet navigates the wonder and tumult of girlhood, the families we yearn for and create. In prose shot through with beauty, Domet intertwines the ordinary and the miraculous, as The Guineveres discover what home really means.
The group at the heart of Sarah Domet's debut novel, The Guineveres, is formed on just about the most prosaic foundation possible: they all share a name. Four young women come to the convent of The Sisters of Supreme Adoration, all for different reasons and out of different situations, but all named Guinevere, and so they become friends. We first meet Ginny, Gwen, Win, and Vere (our narrator) as they're trying to escape the convent at the annual Easter parade. They've got big dreams: they're going to get an apartment together in the city and become secretaries. They can't wait until they're 18 and they're released. They need to get out now.
Their attempt is foiled, of course. They're caught and assigned to duty in the sick ward as punishment. And that's when their lives really do change: five anonymous young men come in, soldiers in the War (it's never quite identified, but maybe Korea or more likely WWII), all comatose. When one of them regains consciousness, an older girl (close to but not quite 18) is sent home with his family to be his nurse. Which gives rise to the next escape plan: when the remaining boys awaken, the Guineveres will get to go away with them, too.
The action moves forward from there, but backwards too. We learn, gradually, about how each of the girls came to the convent and why, and what becomes of them. Domet takes her time, giving her story room to breathe. Her sense of pacing is top notch: she neither engages in gratuitous info dumping, nor gratuitous info withholding. She lets the tale unfold as it will, with lovely, insightful prose as it works along. It's become trendy for promising debuts, especially female-centered ones, to be compared to Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, which happens to be one of my favorite books of all time. That's a pretty high bar to clear, for me, and this might be the first one that I've seen compared to it that I really think measures up. Domet's quality of writing and crafting of story make me so, so excited to both re-read and see what she does next! Definitely highly recommend this read!
