Book Review: When in Rome

When in Rome by Liam Callanan (Dutton, 2023).

When in Rome is one of those novels that shouldn’t work. To be honest, there were moments when I didn’t think it was going to work. It’s 336 pages (or, if you listen to the audiobook like I did, 11 and a half hours) of a woman trying to decide whether she should become a nun.

So it’s not exactly a thrill a minute. And yet, somehow, every time I came back to it, I was drawn in by the richness of Liam Callanan’s prose and the beauty of the city he was describing.

His protagonist, Claire Murphy, finds herself in Rome when her real estate firm is asked to find a buyer for a magnificent old convent, home to an order of nuns that’s on the verge of being disbanded. Claire falls in love with the convent on sight, and can’t help but get involved in the lives and problems of the tiny group of nuns.

Complicating matters is that Claire herself, decades ago, planned to become a nun, and now, seeing the cloistered life up close, she’s starting to think about reviving those old plans. But she still has strong ties back home, and such a change would throw her friends and family into chaos—particularly one friend, Marcus, who’s on the verge of proposing to her.

Callanan writes about Claire’s slowly reviving faith, and about the difficulties she knows she would face as a nun, with respect and gravity. Despite a few surface similarities, this is no Eat, Pray, Love reboot. The religious life, especially in this historic city, has its attractions but also its drawbacks, and the book doesn’t take any of them lightly, making Claire’s long period of indecision understandable.

At the same time, the book rejoices in the pleasures to be found in the city, even for those vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience. The colors, the smells, the tastes, even the graffiti of Rome all come to life in its luminous descriptions. And the nuns of the Order of Saint Gertrude are a no-nonsense but lively bunch who, when not at Mass or teaching, might be found jogging, dancing, or indulging in the local pastries.

Callanan handles so many tricky elements so deftly, in fact, that I’m a little sorry even to mention the book’s one significant weakness: that Claire has a fair amount of Mary Sue in her character. (A Mary Sue, for the unfamiliar, is a fictional character who is perfect in every way and adored by all who meet her.)

We get the full force of the Mary Sue-ness in the flashbacks to Claire’s younger years, when she arrives at Yale determined to earn her degree and then go straight from college to the convent. When her new roommate and others observed of young Claire that “she glows,” my eyes nearly rolled out of my head.

To be fair, Claire does grow out of the glowing stage and becomes a more realistic character, capable of foolish and sometimes bad decisions. Still, she retains a quality that makes her best friend, her love interest, and her daughter eager to drop everything and rush halfway around the world to deal with her existential crisis. For those of us whose loved ones have actual lives and concerns of their own, and don’t spend all their time fretting over ours, it’s a bit much.

If you can deal with that, though, and if you don’t mind a very leisurely pace, When in Rome has a lot to enjoy (especially if you try the audio version with Cassandra Campbell’s warm, mellow narration). However you feel about hanging out with nuns, there are worse places to spend a few hours than Callanan’s lovingly recreated Rome.

Book Links:

When in Rome on Amazon
When in Rome on Bookshop
When in Rome on Audible

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Capsule reviews of a couple of other books I’ve read lately (both by authors whom I’ve reviewed here before):

Queen Wallis by C. J. Carey
Here, and Only Here by Christelle Dabos