We Sinners: A Novel
Hanna Pylväinen
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 1250032180
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This stunning debut novel―drawn from the author's own life experience―tells the moving story of a family of eleven in the American Midwest, bound together and torn apart by their faith
"A resonant and magical work of imagination."―Chicago Tribune
Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award
In this stunning, highly acclaimed debut novel, Hanna Pylväinen's We Sinners introduces us to an unforgettable family, bound together and torn apart by their intense religious devotion. Despite the ways all eleven of the Rovaniemis have built their lives around the conservative religion's rigid guidelines―music, television, makeup, and even school dances are strictly prohibited―their eventual places in the wider world and their paths to get there could not be more different, or more painful to each other. The children who reject the church learn that freedom comes at an almost unbearable cost, and those who stay struggle daily with the temptations of modern culture. Wholly absorbing and unflinching in its emotional honesty, We Sinners shows us how far we will go for faith and for each other, and the consequences when love―or God―is not enough.
looked at him expectantly and he felt it would be rude not to kiss her, so he did. In the brief seconds they had been out of the bar her mouth had managed to become cold, and he was reminded of putting his pillowcase in the freezer in the summer. He pulled away. “I gotta go,” he said. She didn’t disagree. On the walk home he had to stop to throw up, vomiting into a window well because it had the aspect of depth, even though as he did it he could see, through the basement window, people playing
and to church, and even to Communion, the taste of wine at Communion bizarrely familiar and now not unpleasant. When they drove to and from church events they still listened to Clayton’s country music, and they still turned the radio to a news station before they turned into the church’s parking lot. “So I guess it doesn’t matter?” Nels said. “What doesn’t matter?” Clayton said, and they left it at that. Fine, Nels decided, he would put it from his mind—it was just one night, one thing, he
forgiven in Jesus’s name and precious blood,” skipping the extra bits about doubt, and she did not look at Matthew and she did not look at the stranger driving down the street and she waited, Henny Penny–like, for the sky to fall, but no matter what, it did not fall and it did not fall, and instead there was only Matthew and his housemate’s guitar and her mother on the phone, and no matter what none of it went away at all. “I’m sorry,” she said when she hung up. She turned around, and he was
would have to give, and she had nothing left to give at all. For her there would only be the pittance of others’ pity. That poor mother, they would all say. You poor mother, the piano said. “Mom, play something,” Paulie said, and he bent his knees up and down. Obediently she touched her fingers to the keys, the reflection of her fingers shaking. She pushed a key so slowly it made no sound at all. JONAS CHAN HE WAS THE new kid, but already he knew who Uppu Rovaniemi was. Everyone knew who
cold, so that Gunnà rubbed and rubbed reindeer fat onto his face but still his cheeks bled in places. “Did you sew today?” he said. The skins had rotted in the damp of the migration, and there was much that had to be done, before the true cold of winter set in and their hands would be too stiff for the work. “Ha,” her mother said. “Soon,” Gunnà said. It was true she did not yet feel herself, but also true that she could have done much more now. Her mother was always the one with Little-Bell,