Customer Reviews

Thank You Sister!: Memories of Growing Up Catholic

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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This was a great refresher of memories from Catholic school that I had filed away for too long! Beverly did a great job of using the details to remind us of the bigger picture --- how fortunate we are to have been educated by people so dedicated, so loving, and so faithful to God. This is an awesome tribute, and a humorous and touching light read. Thank you, BVMs! And thank you, Beverly.

. . .swirling around the Catholic Church today, "Thank you, Sister" is a beautiful and refreshing change.

Neither deep theology, nor modern controversy, "Thank you, Sister" is the loving memoir of a woman who spent 8 years in Catholic grammar school in the late 1950's and early 1960's. The author credits her own loving upbringing to her own eventual decision to become a teacher herself.

There is a lot of evil in the world, and some of it is in the Church itself. This book serves as a powerful reminder that there is -- and ever has been -- far more good than evil, and that good will ultimately triumph.

A heartwarming read.

..."Thank You, Sister is a nostalgic, yet honest look into the academic and social life of a young Catholic girl in the '60's. Beverly remembers everything I had forgotten. A delightful read.

This is a absolutely breath-takingly beautiful tribute to the dedicated and Holy women who dedicated their lives to teaching Catholic children. Nuns are the unfortunate victims of a lot of untrue lies and vicious anger, thank God for a book that celebrates them for the priceless treasure they are. I shudder to think what the Church and the world would be like without the dedication and love of these women. Anyone who loves being Catholic and loves the nuns needs to read this book.

I truly wanted to like this book so much more than I did.

I am of approximately the same age cohort as the author, and was also taught by the Sisters (in my case, the School Sisters of Notre Dame and Sisters of Saint Joseph) for thirteen years. I was fascinated by them. I, too, never had a truly bad experience with any Sister and remember them very fondly. There was a certain mystery to convent life at the time, and much about it to intrigue a curious young girl. Unfortunately, the author doesn't spend nearly enough time on that topic. By the end of the book, I was still unsure of the point the author was trying to make. This reads as the autobiography of an overly-anxious schoolgirl rather than memories about the Sisters that taught us or any real information about their lives and spirituality.

The more inexcusable problem, however, is that this text needed a much more rigorous editing than it apparently received. There were mistakes in sentence structure and usage that made me cringe. A 30-second look in a dictionary would have revealed that words were misspelled, misused, or even nonexistent. ("Hurtles" for "hurdles" particularly comes to mind.) Normally, this wouldn't have bothered me, but the author is a teacher herself, and the subject of the book was her teachers in her early schooling. Under the circumstances, one would think the author would hold herself to a higher standard.