Miraculous Medal - by Adrian Koesters (Paperback)

About the Book

'Hey, ' Father John heard one of the voices call again. He looked up. It was the brown-haired girl. 'Ain't you gonna come up? We could do somethin.' In this sequel to Union Square, it is 1964 Baltimore, where Fr. John Martin has been haunted by those two questions every day for a dozen years.

Book Synopsis

'Hey, ' Father John heard one of the voices call again. He looked up. It was the brown-haired girl. 'Ain't you gonna come up? We could do somethin.'

In this sequel to Union Square, it is 1964 Baltimore, where Fr. John Martin has been haunted by those two questions every day for a dozen years. His god-brother, Jezriel Heath, walks all over the city in service of his faith, trying to make sense of the contemplative visions that have begun to visit him. John's eight-year-old cousin Marnie, whose Catholic world is "too wonderful, too exciting," is the champion of her best friend, Alice, who clings to Marnie as safety against her own hidden sorrows and traumas.

In this supernaturally charged world, Miraculous Medal looks within each character to reveal "the most important thing," a world where faith is molded by violence and contentment, ignorance and compassion, blind cynicism and equally blind confidence. All four navigate in their adult or childish ways the temptations of suffering and salvation, and each faces a reckoning that accompanies that temptation.

Like Union Square, Miraculous Medal is a novel as rich in humor as it is unflinching in its telling of calamity and loss. It carries the reader to a moment in urban America and Catholic culture on the threshold of radical change, a community unfolding inside a tattered but still-miraculous parochial world.

Review Quotes

"Adrian Koesters writes about childhood like an American Frank McCourt, taking us into a fully realized world of stern-faced nuns and pennies for the Pagan Babies, a world of mothers singing "Chances Are" in the kitchen and adults behaving in unfathomable ways. Miraculous Medal is a large-souled study of the space between the mysteries of faith and the perplexities of desire. A thoroughly absorbing read." --Brent Spencer, author of Rattlesnake Daddy: A Son's Search for His Father

"Miraculous Medal transports us into 1960s Baltimore, and into a richly complex neighborhood whose inhabitants--from saints to sinners--live out their days in perilous proximity to each other's deepest, most painful secrets. Adrian Koesters' ability to enter so completely into the yearnings and fears of four radically different characters took my breath away. I won't soon forget the verve and pluck of the little girls Marnie and Alice, the other-worldly kindness of Jeb Heath, and the hard-won maturity of Father John. Koesters has created a vision of humanity both heartbreaking and transcendent." -Marjorie Sandor, author of The Secret Music at Tordesillas

"What a miracle this book is! From its perfect understanding of Baltimorese--in dialog its authenticity rivals the work of the late Ernest Gaines--through its mixture of deadpan comedy and equally deadpan horror exposed through the voices of its narrators, this work deserves a Medal indeed." -Clarinda Harris, author of Innumerable Moons

"Like a brilliant miniaturist, Koesters captures the denizens of her native Baltimore in their broken moments and the tragedy of their private pain. The beauty of her work is that in such moments, they also understand the whole of life all at once. To read Miraculous Medal is to be pulled into the undertow of her characters' rich and thoroughly expressed inner lives." --Steven Wingate, author of Of Fathers and Fire

"A dream of a book, light-filled and unflinching in its portrayal of four intersecting lives in mid-century Catholic Baltimore. Like specters caught for a moment and held, Adrian Gibbons Koesters' characters are fleeting, luminous, and oh so true. They will haunt you long after you finish the book--and you will be glad for it." --Sonja Livingston, Author of Ghostbread