PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMs. O’Donnell persuasively argues from Seton’s own writings that the standard account overstates the resistance to her religious choices posed by her family and society at large ... Ms. O’Donnell’s story encompasses a cast of characters worthy of a Russian novel; readers may be forgiven for wanting a Seton-Bayley family tree as well as a separate table of names. For the secularly inclined, the number of extended deathbed scenes—albeit standing in a long religious tradition of edifying deaths—may verge on the morbid. And, to this reader at least, the book does not do justice to the charm and humor that formed a central element in Mother Seton’s charisma. But these are mere cavils weighed against a remarkable biography of a remarkable woman.
