Mary-Margaret dedicated her life to God by entering the convent, a move she had prepared for her whole life. But when her childhood friend, Jude, returns from a life of drugs and prostitution, she discovers that following God means something different than she thought.

For those of you who have read any of Samson’s books, I don’t have to tell you that she has a way of animating her characters and getting them in your head–a skill known only to a few writers. There’s something so real and different about them. They do unexpected things, think unexpected thoughts and precisely because of that, they become your friends, not merely characters in a story. Who else but Samson could bring together a religious sister and a rebellious teenager turned prostitute in a relationship of love? She fleshes out mutliple variations–the beautiful and the ugly of different people at different times with prismatic dimensions of loveable, loving, flawed, hurting, and yes, hurtful at times. And this she does with various ages and genders.

Samson also has the ability of writing a story that is unpredicatable yet couldn’t be any other way. I don’t want to rewrite any of it. She reaches beauty without sentimentality because she’s willing to find and sculpt beauty by drudging through the tomb.

Some books make me want to become a better version of me. The Passion of Mary-Margaret does that. Samson shows us that following God is hard but rewarding. Some of her proddings about how Christians should treat the poor and "the sinful" (for lack of a better term) could become preachy, but she avoids that by presenting aspects of the Christian life through characters we love.

Needless to say, I highly recommend this book.