Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood

It feels churlish to say so, but this was so exactly what I expected it to be that it felt borderline satirical. A bleak, austere story of a woman coming to a community of nuns and reckoning with horrors of the past both personal and collective. Punctuated with startlingly grotesque stuff about mice (that, I wasn’t expecting, but it also seemed right — like the twist that really sells it to the prize committee). I bet the mouse parts are what will stay with me the most, too, which is irritating.