Rating: - Disappointment
Holy Fools / 0-552-77001-9

What happened here? I loved Chocolat, and I adored Five Quarters of the Orange. Holy Fools, however, seems like it came from a completely different author. The book is acceptable, but not up to Harris' standards.

To start, the standard Mother-Daughter theme that Harris employs so well is deeply underdeveloped here as more of a plot device than anything else. There was a lot of potential here - a nun with a beloved daughter, raising her in the nunnery, safe from the outside world, and yet perhaps a little too sheltered. The daughter could be a little wild, a little free, a little rebellious, wanting to know the curiosities of the outside world. Or the daughter could be content, yet the mother conflicted that her safe daughter might be missing so much. Vianne would do that. Not so here - the only real point of the daughter seems to be to get herself kidnapped and squirreled away so that our heroine cannot flee the chaos, interfere effectively, or do much else besides narrate the descent into madness she is forced to witness.

I could accept the "daughter as hostage" plot device, were the main character not so otherwise one-dimensional. Though the villain has cruelly treated her numerous times, including (and most recently) kidnapping her daughter and taking over her sanctuary for his own nefarious purposes (including seducing the nuns late at night), she seems less intent on bearing a grudge and more intent on mooning her way back into his bed. I was more than a little enraged at a late-at-night scene in his house - if you had a moment alone with the man who kidnapped your daughter, would you sleep with him and cheerily leave the next morning, or would you wait until he was asleep, tie him up, and then 'persuade' him to tell you where he stashed your child? I don't even have children, yet I know what I would do. The fact that rough persuasion does not seem to ever occur to our heroine is completely maddening, especially given that Harris has gone out of her way to emphasize that the lady has wonderful survival skills and could manage easily outside the nunnery, even with her child. How can someone so resourceful be so helpless for 90% of the narrative?

Harris' crisp insight into females isn't just lost on our heroine. All the women in this novel are worthless, emotional idiots. The nuns quickly and easily descend into madness, under the manipulation of the villain. This isn't presented as religious hysteria a la Salem - instead, the women seem either intensely stupid or completely eager to join the villain for their own reasons (lust, hatred, attention-seeking). The subtlety necessary for religious hysteria seems completely absent here, which is astonishing, because I believe that if anyone could have pulled it off, Harris could have. Again, what happened here?

This isn't a bad novel. It's got enough cliches to shake a stick at, and it's incredibly frustrating at bits, but so are many decent novels. But this is a bad novel for Harris. You may enjoy this, if you check it out at a library, or find it at a half-price store, but don't expect Harris quality. In the end, I didn't hate it, but I was deeply disappointed.

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