The Calling Of Mother Adelli

By Zoe Keithley

In an exclusive Catholic boarding school outside Chicago, story-time is September, 1948. Former ballerina Mary Agnes Adelli, now a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart and newly appointed Mistress of the Third Cours, expects to make final vows in just nine months when a late registrant, a sixth grade student, Helene Rhenehan, enters her life.Enraged at being abandoned by her doctor father, the perceptive ten year-old channels her fear and desire to retaliate toward the nun. Helene rightly intuits that Mother Adelli is easy prey, for the twenty-eight year-old nun is riddled with fault lines that only wait for stress sufficient to cause their eruption. Helene, in her furious misery, creates a three-ring circus in the prim and proper school. Things spiral downward with dizzying speed, disintegrating Mother Adelli's standing with her students and attacking the fault lines of her persona as a religious. Can discipline, reason, good intentions and prayer bring about the change needed before the girl damages other lives besides her own?The Calling of Mother Adelli is a coming-of-age-tale of a young woman caught in a Gordian knot with great institutions. Though set in 1945, her story mirrors the struggles of our own times where loyalty to establishments--inherited, required or chosen--may come into collision with the deep issues of social responsibility and freedom of personal conscience.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1496186559
• ISBN13: 9781496186553
• Release Date: March 2014
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.7" x 5.0"