In Claire Luchette’s debut novel, four young sisters must make a new life for themselves when the day care they’ve been running closes its doors and their elderly superior retires. Their world is contained within the little house they share.Īgatha has lived every day of the last seven years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together.As Catholic religious sisters dwindle in numbers, age into old folks’ homes, and sell off their mother houses and hospitals, younger sisters increasingly have to find new ways to live out their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience without the accompaniment of their peers. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life.

But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move.

They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. 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 Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. They head up a halfway house, where they live alongside castoffs like the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill.

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. Claire Luchette (Author of Agatha of Little Neon) Claire Luchette Goodreads Author Born in Buffalo, NY Website Member Since January 2021 edit data Claire Luchette has published work in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Granta. 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? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.

It is a novel about female friendship and devotion, the roles made available to us, and how we become ourselves.

Claire luchette agatha of little neon