The Rebel Nun: A Novel

In the Middle Ages, women had three choices for how to live their lives: marriage, prostitution, or the cloister. Some fortunate few were able to escape this narrow world proscribed by Christianity, but the vast majority had to find their contentment where they could, trying to make lives for themselves out of what little they were given. Those who attempted to fight back were crushed, sometimes brutally.

Such was the case for Clotild, a Gallic nun of the sixth century. From a brief, fragmentary history, Charlier has spun out a possibility of her story, told from her point of view as she rebels against a system that would keep her and her sisters silent in the face of oppression. The book is told in hindsight, which gives it a meditative, mournful quality. Clotild already knows what happened, and we as readers can very likely guess what the ending of her tale will be.

Knowing the ending, though, is not a reason to put down the book. If anything, it’s a reason to keep going. With every page, I felt as though I bore witness to what might have happened. This book was a wonderful chance to step further back into the past than historical fiction commonly allows, and I highly recommend it.