Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy

For fans of stories about nuns, the protagonist is one of the Sisters of Bethany, an order based on the idea that the woman taken in adultery, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Bethany (sister of Martha) were the same person. Much detail about convent life, combined with a rather lurid story about Sister Lise's infamous past. As in some of her other books, Godden writes in a distinctive style, which often shifts tenses and moves from one character's point of view to another. Most interesting to me was the way she brought out the story of one character that none of the others were privy to, making sense of and humanizing her – but it was sad that this remained a secret only known to the reader.