Here we have a first novel published in 1979. I am left to guess that it didn't set the sales charts afire by the fact that it's all but disappeared from Ms. Bonanno's CV ( see her website and be persistent!), but that sure hasn't stopped Ms. Bonanno from being a very successful writer (back to the CV, helluva career).

Many first novels feature a protagonist that is the author in a fright wig, so to speak. I suspect that this novel features a supporting character that's the author in a fright wig, the character of Vicki, the judgmental friend of a young mother getting a divorce. The fact that Vicki gets the space and sympathy she does, when she's not central to the plot, makes me suspect this...I ccould be wrong, of course.

The novel itself is about Sarah, the distinguished and successful professor at a small Catholic school, whose devastating stroke leaves her changed forever, and in need of round-the-clock help. Joan, a young college-educated divorcing mother, needs a job to support herself and her son. Pietro, a priest and Sarah's teaching colleague, is utterly in love with Sarah and, we suspect, she with him...but Sarah never encourages him to break his vows as she did by leaving a nunnery to marry a famous sculptor so long ago.

These three people, quite convincingly drawn, are in orbit around each other held by the metaphysical gravity of love...and by the different force that is lovingkindness. Each character has strong bonds of affection to Sarah and to each other, but each is also acting out of the need to express a sort of agape for the others, that disinterested spirit of goodwill that is such a Catholic staple in Good Works.

But Bonanno's long career in fiction can be explained in one short sentence about this, her first novel: She makes you believe that goodness, lovingkindness, is real.

I believe Sarah helps Joan, who helps her, and Pietro helps them both, for the mixed and very human motives that power each of us in our actions. But the impressive skill of a first-time novelist in delineating characters who can believably act selflessly should not go unremarked.

This is a period piece in many ways. I recommend it to aficionados of character-driven stories, to people over 45, and to Catholics who would like to remember what it was like to read something about a *good* priest. ( )