Young Saints

A Novel · Young Saints

The bells still ring across the neighborhood on Sunday mornings, the way they have for a hundred years. Inside the small houses, the kettles go on, the cigarettes get lit, and the children are sent to Mass in pants that never quite fit.

It is a bright, working-class spring in Catholic Boston — street hockey and screen doors, walks to school and Saturday shifts, cigarette smoke and those Sunday bells. Mary is finishing school and holding the family together. Her little brother is learning to pitch. Their grandmother is holding the line.

No one is looking at the one boy who has gone quiet.

It is a story about the seasons a family passes through without knowing which one will change everything — about innocence, and the long shadow it casts once it's gone.