Stone Yard Devotional

 Stone Yard Devotional 

by Charlotte Wood

What did I just read?

Painful. Confusing. And honestly, not for me.

I’m not even sure how I came to reading it but I didn’t get it. I wanted to stop reading several times, but I kept going, mostly out of stubbornness and the hope that it might eventually get better.

My advice? Don’t even start.

I'll save you the time and do my best to provide a recap:  The book is a quiet, deeply contemplative novel centered on an unnamed woman who, in quick succession, divorces, loses her mother, quits her job with an endangered species organization, and finds herself at the beginning of the Covid shutdown. In response to all of this upheaval, she retreats to a remote religious community of cloistered nuns in rural Australia.

If you’re expecting tension, momentum, or even a compelling narrative…you won’t find it here.

Instead, the novel drifts…many times. There is a truly horrendous mouse plague that receives an extraordinary amount of attention…far more than I felt it deserved…and the graphic detail became distracting and gross rather than meaningful. There’s also the return of the bones of a nun murdered thirty years earlier, which causes disruption within the community, and the presence of a once-famous, scandal-tainted nun who attended high school with the narrator and endured a brutal, shame-filled upbringing.

All of this feeds into what the book is really doing: an introspective meditation on guilt, unresolved grief, forgiveness, and how, or whether, it’s possible to live meaningfully in the world after loss. On an intellectual level, I understand that this is what Wood is aiming for. On a reading level, I found it heavy, slow, and emotionally distant.

Ultimately, Stone Yard Devotional feels less like a novel and more like a prolonged meditation on life itself…on letting go, grieving, and the elusive nature of forgiveness. For some readers, that may be profound. For me, it was tedious and overwrought, with far too much time spent on mice and not enough on making me care.

If you like quiet, philosophical fiction and don’t mind ambiguity or discomfort, perhaps you will enjoy it. I just did not.