SISTER JANE

In Brown’s debut novel, a seemingly miraculous gift upends an ordinary woman’s life.

Jane Freedle is absent-mindedly singing the hymn “Oh Christ the Healer” at church. “What would it be like to be a healer?” Jane wonders, but her pondering isn’t idle. She had prayed over a cat hit by a car, and the cat had instantly recovered; she had prayed over an injured fellow church member, and they had instantly recovered. Suddenly, Jane finds herself wondering what is happening to her normal life as a friendly, retired schoolteacher and widow living in Lafayette, Maryland. But these seeming miracles keep piling up. Her prayers heal a dying old woman at the nursing home where Jane volunteers, and when she mistakenly tells her pastor about it, he tells Jane’s daughter, Maddie, that Jane might be going a little crazy after living alone for years after the death of her husband, Richard. But when Maddie’s little daughter has her own accident, Jane heals her before the paramedics even arrive, although nobody seems to believe it. “Her family thought she was bananas,” Jane reflects, “her pastor thought she was senile, and her friends thought she was delusional.” To complicate matters, a washed-up reporter named Wade Twomey has been assigned to investigate seeming miracles happening in this small town, and he quickly considers Jane the heart of the story. That story only grows more complicated for Jane and everybody else, and Brown writes it all with an invigorating pace and an enjoyably understated humor that breaks through everywhere. Jane is portrayed as an endearingly fallible and unlikely miracle worker, a retiree who slips into profanity too easily and keeps up a running argument with her dead husband. It’s Jane’s complete lack of predictable sanctimony that gives the novel its consistent charm.

A wise, winning story of a modern-day miracle worker.