Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (London: Pushkin Vertigo, 2023)
Scorched Grace is a book for our times. In a summer of record-breaking, punishing heat, what could be more pertinent than a mystery novel that revels in fire and scorching weather? From the cigarettes indulged in by Sister Holiday, the unlikely queer novice at the Sisters of the Sublime Blood in New Orleans, to the lighter constantly flickered by a delinquent student, and on up to the towering flames that consume parts of Saint Sebastian’s School, fire is the animating element of this novel.
Hot, humid, weather, on the other hand, slows the novel down, insisting on a pace that is languorous and immediate, like lying in the yard on a summer’s day so oppressive all you can do is listen to the cicadas and watch the grass grow. Sister Holiday has recently made the transition from the life of a queer hipster in Brooklyn to holy orders down South. The novel’s vivid, visceral descriptions plunge us into her new world: from the sound of wind through the trees to the smell of a student’s unwashed hair, we are in immediate contact with Sister Holiday’s experience. Reflecting on a life now stripped of distractions like smartphones and social media, she says: “Nuns forge genuine connections, soul to eternal soul. What choice do we have but to be achingly present?” That phrase – achingly present – has rattled around my mind since I finished the book. It captures Douaihy’s insistence on going beyond the superficial, making what could be a silly set-up (urban queer in the convent!) instead a genuine exploration of how we are made, and unmade, by our circumstances and our contexts.
The mystery centres around a series of arson attacks and suspicious deaths. Uncomfortably close to the scene of the initial crime, Sister Holiday soon suspects she’s being framed. So she sets out to solve the case herself, buttressed by a childhood spent imbibing classic detective fiction. (A cute detail: her family’s cat was named Marple.) Sister Holiday makes a good case for why she’s an excellent amateur sleuth, but it kind of feels like she’s fronting. She does a lot of looking around, being confused, and getting into tangles with various members of law enforcement, in between carrying out her duties as a music teacher and as a nun.
Speaking of law enforcement: a few weeks before I read this book, a friend asked if I had any recommendations for mystery novels that were anti-police or that chimed with a prison abolitionist outlook. I’d say Scorched Grace fits the bill pretty well. One of the more moving subplots involves the nuns’ work with incarcerated mothers. It’s unsparing on the cruelties of the prison system. And we see the police officers investigating the arson abusing their power while also being blatantly incompetent. There is one sympathetic figure on the police side of things, but one who is facing plenty of her own challenges and issues – and who seems likely to figure as an intriguing sidekick in future Sister Holiday books.
Sister Holiday fled Brooklyn, and her rock’n’roll lifestyle there, because of some heavy family stuff that is slowly revealed over the course of the novel. She’s looking for a new place to belong: as she puts it, “it all made me crave a different kind of family, a community of my own design. I appreciated being a Sister, belonging to our Order.” This is an example of how Douaihy is alive to the resonances between a religious order and queer community, rather than setting them up as opposites. Both can be a refuge from our origins; both can be a context for the weaving of chosen families, alternative kinships, a community of our own design.
One of the questions that interests me as a historian is how, and when, the idea of chosen family became so embedded in contemporary queer culture. I’m curious, too, about what gets smuggled in with that concept – or to put it another way, what we miss when we over-valorize the idea of chosenness, ignoring how it fails to transform family into something that is only good. Scorched Grace cleverly avoids that trap. Sister Holiday went looking for reinvention, but finds out she’s still herself, and families can harm as well as shelter no matter how they’re made.
I bought Scorched Grace from the marvellous High Street Books and Records. You can find out more about the book and how to read it here.