The Guineveres, Sarah Domet’s deft and lovely debut, is the perfect weight, in all ways. It’s suitable for a vacation, and you can describe it in one inviting line, but then it keeps unfolding and deepening, taking unexpected turns ... Intercut with their collective story are Vere’s retellings of the lives of the saints. These chapters emerge as examples, often gory, of women rejecting the meager possibilities offered to them — forced marriage, circumscribed existence — in a desperate search for something more exalted, a greater purpose ... inside the walls, a vivid, pungent, complex universe hums. And for Vere, the inner life of the passions is where the extraordinary and miraculous events occur.
It's a bizarre plot that becomes a beautiful, sad, engaging story in the hands of American author Sarah Domet, one that gracefully jumps from the girls' present lives to their pasts to their futures, not necessarily in that order. This, her very first novel, belongs in the ranks of the best books of 2016.
Feverish romantic fantasies end in ways none could have foreseen, but not before Domet has spun the schemes and passions of four adolescent girls into a dreamlike tapestry that speaks to anyone who’s ever been young and desperate for love.
...after a deceptively simple start, a book of surprising substance ... There is both hilarity and heartache here as the girls – known as Gwen, Ginny, Win and Vere – attempt to conceal themselves within a parade float headed into town where they intend to slip away, nevermore to be seen by the Sisters of the Supreme Adoration ... Naiveté falls to the wayside as The Guineveres progresses, becoming a remarkedly layered and affecting book with an improbable extra heroine.
Though each girl eventually shares her backstory with us, it seems clear that they don’t share those stories with each other. More problematic is that rather than breathing real life and depth into her characters, Domet often treats them as caricatures, painting the girls, Sister Fran, and others with a broad and heavy-handed narrative brush ... There are elements of lovely writing throughout that measure up to the promise of that first page. Domet sprinkles in descriptions of the lives of saints, all women, each of whom represents an eye-popping object lesson in sacrifice that, undoubtedly, Sister Fran wishes to impart to her always possibly wayward girls. But where it really counts, the novel is missing the depth and nuance that would have transformed an interesting story into a deeply felt story.
