I'm so happy to see a rave review for Agatha of Little Neon in the Sunday NY Times Book Review section today (Sept 12 2021)~ here is a link. I can't be trusted about this novel any longer is what I'm trying to say. It's more like the most lovely handmade thing you ever came across in an antique shop, that handcrafted thing you've been looking for all your life and didn't know it. I kept thinking: How can words on their own be so delightful? How can words keep silently making these lovely little starbursts come inside my mind, almost entirely independent of their meaning? How can a whole book of sentences just keep on, and keep on, each next-sentence so unexpected? So here is what I'm trying to say: If you're a prose person, then you may feel the same way. The way the sentences leap and curve and sometimes stop still and hang there, suspended-until the next breath comes.
I just finished reading Agatha of Little Neon and I feel, I don't know, maybe the word is: "raptured." Which is different from feeling merely "enraptured," I don't even care what this story is about-although I loved the story-because what has left me feeling weepy and loose-jointed and maybe even a little in love with Claire Luchette is the prose. It is a novel about female friendship and devotion, the roles made available to us, and how we become ourselves. Who will she be if she isn't with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home-or has she just been hiding?ĭisarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette's Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone, to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she will have to reckon with what she sees and feels all on her own. They head up a halfway house, where they live alongside castoffs like the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life.īut when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. Their world is contained within the little house they share. Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don't), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self.Īgatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together.
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