Title: Translation of the Bones
Author: Francesca Kay
Publication Year: 2012
Publisher: Scribner
Edition: eBook - Kindle
Setting: London Source: purchase
Date Completed: July/2012
Rating: 5/5
Recommend: yes The Church of the Sacred Heart in London takes center stage in Translation of the Bones, a moving story about how different individuals deal with issues like faith, loss and grief.
Mary Margaret O'Reilly is a 33 year-old woman, childlike in thought and action. She lives at home with her morbidly obese, housebound mother, Fidelma. One day, in preparation for Easter week services at the church where she volunteers, she is cleaning a statue of Christ, and while doing this she believes she sees blood coming from Christ's wounds, taking a tumble and bumping her head in the process. Off to the hospital she goes, however, the incident causes hysteria among the faithful when word about what she claims to have witnessed spreads far and wide, and the faithful flock to this small church.
When one of the other volunteers hears that Mary Margaret took a tumble, bumped her head and was in the hospital, her response was....
"Mary Margaret was already two-sandwiches short of a picnic, Mrs. Armitage had said. Lord knows what she'll be like now."
Without giving too much away, I'll just say that this book is so much more than a story about someone claiming to have witnessed a miraculous vision. It's a story about several individuals dealing with their own inner turmoil, and issues of faith. The author does a wonderful job delving into the psyche of each of the characters: Mary Margaret, her mother Fidelma, Mrs. Armitage, Stella Morrison and Father Diamond. For me, Mary Margaret was such a sympathetic character, especially after learning about her mother's past, and the dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship the two had shared. In fact, all of the characters were memorable in their own way.
The story is very dark, but at the same time time thought provoking. For a debut novel, the author expertly creates an atmosphere of foreboding that makes the fewer than 250 pages seem to come alive off the pages. The ending was one worth waiting for ---wow.
(Initially when I finished this book in July, my rating was 4.5/5, but now that (3+) weeks have passed ,I've decided as I write this review, it's definitely one of the better books I've read recently. It is just so different from anything else I've read in a long time, so I really feel it's worthy of a 5/5 stars rating.
READ this BOOK.
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