Our Lady of the Lost and Found

I’ve been unable to post for a few days due to the laziness imposed by a long weekend followed by our internet dying, but I did do one thing this weekend. I spent several hours adding books to my LibraryThing account so roughly half of our library is in now, half of the portion that is not in storage anyway. As soon as we get the internet back I plan to finish adding books. Because I’m proud of all my work I added a widget to the side of this page that shows a random selection of books from my library. My point is that LibraryThing is really cool and everyone should check it out so they can have an awesome widget like mine!

Our Lady of the Lost and Found by Diane Shoemperlen was sort of recommended to me by Amy, who let me borrow her copy. I say sort of because she basically handed it to me and said it was kind of interesting and that she didn’t really like it, but it wasn’t too bad. That’s pretty much how I felt about it.

The book is about a writer who is visited by Mary. Mary tells her that she needs a rest and would like to stay for a week. The two women spend a quiet week together taking, cooking, and shopping. Mary tells of her miracles and appearances, while the writer reflects on her life.

It’s really not as dull as it sounds; it’s just not my sort of thing. I enjoyed the history of Marian visions and miracles, although I constantly felt like the author was taking the supposed miracles too much at face value. I understand that the book works under the assumption that such things are possible, but some of them are so far fetched that it’s just ridiculous. I kept expecting the scene to return with Mary saying, “of course they just made that one up.” There is a lot of discussion of the writer’s process, which I found inspiring. I liked reading about her writing random sentences down just to see if anything might come of them one day.

As I said in the beginning, I didn’t really like the book, but I didn’t particularly dislike it either. I probably won’t be recommending it to friends or reading it again, but it was an interesting read.