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All weekend I had waited for the perfect moment to savor the cigarettes, and it had finally arrived that Sunday. I was sweating through every layer of my uniform, but I needed more time outside. Without a minute to myself, I’d snap at Sister Honor. My fuse was still dangerously short, and Sister Honor knew how to wind me up. As much as I love YA mysteries from the '90s, I was expecting something more complex from the debut novel of Gillian Flynn's publishing company. Books like this are exactly why Gone Girl was such a game-changer. My hope was that Flynn had scouted out authors who could play at her level while we wait in agony for her next book. Not so much with this one. Scorched Grace is Douaihy's debut novel and my criticism of it is that a mystery is not incorporated in a strong way. Sister Holiday is a detective who spends most of her time ambushing investigators or others and not that much time detecting. Her social work takes her to the Women's Birth Center of a prison, a location fertile with intimate mysteries. In contrast, Sister Holiday's relationship to the janitor or her school feel tenuous. I thought she would've been fine had investigators done their jobs. The mystery element comes off with very low import. My book’s anti-hero lone wolf sleuth, Holiday Walsh, is a thirty-three-year-old nun with a hot temper and a cold worldview. Her tattooed body, musical talent, and stubborn, extremist proclivities get her into trouble and bring her close to redemption as a Sister of the Sublime Blood. Punk music and prayer are guttural, visceral, and kinetic experiences for Sister Holiday. She often improvises her own prayers—riffing and swerving around the originals—as she discovers her own nervy music. As she tries to solve an arson-and-murder case, she interrogates her community, herself, and her own imbricated identities. My goal for Scorched Grace is to overlay multiple mysteries and introduce a queer sleuth who is both an investigator and instigator. Punk’s perennial middle finger was crucial to this flip of the noir script. Scrappy DIY Style
Molly Stern announced Thursday that she is starting Zando, an independent publishing company that will team up with influencers and brands to promote books. Holiday rats on her friends to the police any time she can. Her excuse is that she has to suspect everyone, even though no one asked her to help with the investigation and she is always wrong and just causes hurt to the people she cares about. SPOILER For example, a history teacher at the school has a disabled wife and so he needs his job to financially support them both. Holiday finds out accidentally that he drinks on the job, but no one had ever noticed it before. Obviously he shouldn’t be doing that, but instead of privately confronting him about it, Holiday immediately tells the police. The police take him away and it is clear that he will lose his job, and he won’t be able to support his disabled wife. (And he is not the eventual culprit.) She swiftly lifted her two-way radio, pressed her lips against the perforated surface of the mic. “217 to Dispatch.” When disaster strikes Saint Sebastian’s, in the form of arson and murder, Sister Holiday’s inability to stand by draws even more attention to her, and might be a danger to her life. Scorched Grace has much in common with the neo-noir detective shows that have dominated my own binge-watching for several years ( Mare of Easttown, Happy Valley, Broadchurch, True Detective). Sister Holiday’s amateur sleuth is akin to those other detectives, who are determined to break open the case even at the risk of destroying their own already precarious personal lives. Tortured by her own dark past, she treasures the calmness of Saint Sebastian’s, yet at the same time, her fiery temper and belief in justice and redemption won’t allow her to stand by when a presumed arsonist threatens the peace. She attempts to compartmentalize the traumas of her own life as she becomes obsessed with solving the rapidly developing mystery. But it begins to close in on her, threatening to destroy any semblance of calm she has found in New Orleans. A flaming body dropped from the second floor of the burning east wing and pounded the ground like a vicious fist.
Douaihy's Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr (2022) [27] and Scranton Lace (2018) [28] are documentary poetry projects centering themes of queerness, abandoned structures and institutions, feminist becoming, and class tensions. Douaihy is a Co-Editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Crime Narratives Series. [29] Personal life [ edit ] Longing to go into a sacred space and feeling distant is a hard, hard feeling,” Douaihy said during an interview over the phone. “Yearning to feel called because that’s what your tradition is. Wanting to make your people proud, make your priest proud, and failing to do that can be self-lacerating. It felt awful for me.” Fearless, ebullient, and twisty as hell, Scorched Grace remixes the crime novel for our current age, and debuts a magnetic noir heroine, whose brash wit and profound soulfulness command our instant and utter devotion.” - Debra Jo Immergut, author of Your Again and The Captives Weinman, Sarah (February 10, 2023). "A Nun With Very Bad Habits". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved March 20, 2023. When she recalls the electrifying sexual chemistry she had with Nina, she brings an air of holiness, of religious ecstasy, to their desire.”
The characters, too, feel vibrant and real, Sister Holiday in particular. They’re compelling, so you want to read about them, and that’s mostly what drives the desire to discover the solution to the mystery. It’s more character-driven than plot-driven, which makes it a good thing that the characters are so engaging. CWs: homophobic slurs, past homophobic violence & gang rape, arson, animal death, cancer, death by fire Heavy are also the topics discussed – and sometimes instantly dropped again – in this novel. There are trigger warnings in abundance, most notably: queer trauma and abuse. Reading about these topics doesn’t trigger me but this is where I like to say that Trauma. Doesn’t. Make. Character. I don’t care what you put your characters through, I’ll read it. But give me a reason why you put them through excruciating pain laden with homophobic acts of violence resulting in life-long trauma. I need to see why. I won’t give a damn about your character only because you are telling me what horrible things they went through. Turn their trauma into something that propels the story or someone’s character development forward. Give me a reason to feel angry about it happening to them in the first place instead of just being angry about the act of rape, abuse, or violence itself.This book was very quirky and unexpected in a lot of ways, which is why I've upped my score here. I feel like a lot of novels follow a prescribed formula that gets dull and uninspiring, but Douaihy did a great job at keeping me on my toes here. Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author. Scorched Grace” is the debut novel by author Margot Douaihy and the first publication from Gillian Flynn (author of “Gone Girl”). A powerful story about religion and sin, family, and secrets so powerful they are literally buried in the ashes. Scorched Grace” is the debut novel by author Margot Douaihy and the first publication from Gillian Flynn (author of “ Gone Girl”). A powerful story about religion and sin, family, and secrets so powerful they are literally buried in the ashes.
To me, faith represents stories that we can tell ourselves to believe in something or each other. And those stories, of course, can be twisted and manipulated for gaslighting, but it’s all bubbling up under the surface. The “why not?” is also very queer to me. Queering things shakes up heteronormative power structures and expectations. So like, why not have a queer sleuth who’s unapologetically gay and also has to fall in line with the conventions of this place? It was really crucial to have [her] be proud and unapologetic and complex within this very, very, very damaging institution — and one that also provides some comfort, some solace, some community for people, which I think is a very beautiful thing. I really respect people who want help, and who want serve, like nurse and nuns. If you devote your life to something like that I’m like, “Wow. That’s really beautiful and important.”
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Part of the issue was Douaihy’s sexuality. “I did not feel comfortable coming out of the closet for a long time and, as a result, silenced my true self and my true voice,” she said. Ultimately, it was art — not religion — that saved her. The cries amplified behind me. I snapped around, tried to follow the voices. The door to the old religion classroom was open and inside the room, squashed on the floor, were Jamie and Lamont. Why were they there? What did they see? What did they do? Honors include a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship (2022), The Florida Review Humboldt Poetry Prize, Runner-Up (2021), Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award, Finalist (2021), Ernest Hemingway Foundation Hemingway Shorts, Finalist (2021), Lambda Literary Award Poetry, Finalist (2015), and First Book Foundation of Greater New Orleans Grant, Winner (2009). One of the police officers actually says the word “question mark” at the end of asking questions near the beginning of the book. There is no explanation for why she does that, and later on in the book the police officer stops doing that without explanation. April 22, 2023 Update The Poisoned Pen Bookstore YouTube channel is hosting a discussion with 'Scorched Grace' author Margot Douaihy and her publisher Gillian Flynn tonight at 19:00 hours. You can watch it live here (it should also be recorded for archived viewing afterwards).
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