The Passions of Saint Francis Charles Gaines
Young Cecilia, torn between her desire to become a nun and her love for a man, ponders the question while she writes the story of Mother Chiara’s life in her journal. Later, Brother Leo, her friend, provides her with his account of the charismatic Francis, who he helped when Francis had lost his order, and turned to despair. This novel tells Saint Francis’s and Saint Clare’s stories in the form of these diaries in a simply-written, but an intense and profound way. Saint Francis and Saint Clare are always fascinating, but this was a compelling story. What struck me most about this book was the passion which Francis and Chiara felt for one another, and the spiritual and unearthly love that it became. The author was at his best here. I felt that strangely, however, Charles Gaines probably captured Saint Clare’s personality better than Saint Francis’s, whose imagined fanaticism annoyed me until almost the end of the book when he and Urso, Brother Leo’s brother, began to consider huge...
