“The story is told with passion and sincerity. Gaines easily captures the personalities of the main players, finding humor and pathos … Everyone here is interesting as a person, which is a testament to Gaines’s skill as a writer… This is a very successful and entertaining attempt to make a saint into a remarkable flesh-and-blood human being, someone who agonized over their destiny, their attempts to know God, and their desire to help their fellow human beings. Fans of historical fiction and those seeking deeper knowledge of their own religion will find much to enjoy here.
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On an unseasonably warm November morning of our Lord’s 1253, Brother Leo, suspended friar of the Order of Lesser Brothers, walked with a light tread despite his advanced years from the stone shed that was the home of his present disgrace to the Commune of Assisi. Throughout the two-mile walk he hummed contentedly to himself and kept his face lifted, searching among the clouds for animal shapes according to his lifelong habit, and was rewarded with a vague goose and a well-defined sheep. After entering the wall surrounding the Commune at its south gate, he passed military exercises being conducted in the Campo di Sementone, and upon coming into the city itself he was assaulted by the raucous bustling typical of pleasant days like this one when merchants conducted business on the streets outside their shops. But so happily preoccupied was Leo with his mission of today that he passed these manifestations of two old enemies, war and commerce, without so much as a scowl.
Jostled from time to time in his transit across the piazza and on guard for its pickpockets (though all his one pocket contained was a breviary), Leo bade good day to Adolfo the cheese maker, a fashioner of fine coffins named Gerardo di Russi, a scurrying Benedictine priest of slight acquaintance, and a female blacksmith who called herself Contessa Consulata and who blew him a kiss from grimy fingers.
