Novel As Veneration: A Review from Paloma & Fig
Happy Feast Day to St. Catherine of Siena!
Today I had the honor of having my book reviewed by Paloma & Fig, a site dedicated to creative Catholic evangelization. Titled “Novel As Veneration: Jenny DuBay’s World Between Worlds” lead editor Franci Revel Eckensberger reflects:
In duBay’s vivid Siena, we’re placed in a medieval atmosphere of church bells and incense drifting on the air, candles flickering over a tumultuous childbirth, the austerity of the curia a setting all its own. Plague stalks the entire work and infuses the mystical with inevitable mortality. We touch the raw wool that Catherine’s father dyes for a living and feel the arid heat of a city in perpetual drought, inhabited by a people marked by war and political turmoil. Though focused on Catherine’s young life, World Between Worlds lays the foundation for everything that is to follow.
duBay’s writing is epic, fervent and painterly in its detail, tender and moving in individual scenes and in overall effect. Historical novels, especially those set in medieval times, can so often feel canned or ballooning with facts, lacking the power we ask of fiction to go beyond information and into transformation. This one does not. duBay has inhabited the world and mind of her character such that her extensive research has emulsified into a living story. Its heart has a beat, and it’s almost like novel as veneration. Honest and dramatic, it both educated me and moved me to tears on more than one occasion, particularly when it dipped into such achingly reverent, personal language from Catherine to Christ that I felt almost forced to stop reading and begin praying myself.
For this reason, I’m inclined to also call it novel as evangelization.
In his Letter to Women, St. John Paul II named Catherine directly, holding her up alongside Teresa of Ávila as evidence of what he called the feminine genius, the particular gift women bring to the Church and to the world. He wrote that women see persons “with their hearts,” independently of systems or ideologies. Catherine did this, and as a novelist, duBay does, too.
I’m grateful for this chance to be reviewed by Paloma & Fig, and I’m pleased to share the review with my readers.
Special Offer!
World Between Worlds is on sale today only, for $10 off retail price, in honor of St. Catherine’s feast day!
If you’re intrigued by the life of St. Catherine of Siena and want to learn more, my adaptation of her early life (part one of a two book series) is currently on sale when you purchase directly from my website.
Learn more about World Between Worlds: A Novel Based on the Early Life of Caterina, the Mystic of Siena.
You can also purchase on Amazon using my affiliate link.
