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 Guineveres is the story of 4 girls named Guinevere who befriend each other after each being left at a convent to live until they are 18. It is wartime (though we don't know which war, exactly), and after a failed escape attempt, they are assigned to taking care of young, comatose soldiers in the convent's sick ward. For the girls, these soldiers aren't a chore, but a possible way out of their current lives.
I finished this, but it was a really slow read. You get each girl's back story, but I wanted these earlier in the book. Once I read a back story, I felt like it was easier to tell each girl apart; before that, I had to concentrate to realize who was who. There are also stories of several saints interspersed in the story. I felt very lost in time, because some times I felt sure it was WWII, other times it felt more like Vietnam, and I could have been completely wrong and it was actually WWI -- there's no real way to tell. Being unable to place the time period was disorienting. Also, the treatment of the soldiers by the girls made me uncomfortable at times. They were treated more like dolls than like human beings.
Overall it's not a terrible story, but it was too slow for me and by the end I found I didn't really care what happened to each girl.
