August Fiction Book Club Pick

I'm pleased to share the following letter to our readers from author Debra Murphy, who penned our August Fiction Selection, The Mystery of Things. For more information on ordering this book click here.

Dear Catholic Mom readers,

I’m honored and excited that The Mystery of Things was chosen for the August fiction read of the CatholicMom.com book club. But I have a little confession to make, which I hope will make your reading experience more fruitful and enjoyable: You, faithful Catholic mothers, many of you striving for holiness in your family life, were not the “target audience”, as the marketing people like to put it, of my novel: I wrote it primarily with college-age non-Catholics (or lukewarm Catholics) in mind—young people without a firm faith foundation seeking to make sense of their lives and our present troubled culture, often in the face of personal challenges, powerful temptations, and destructive ideologies. (Young people, in fact, like my protagonist, James.) This may help explain for some of you why the book was written with unusual frankness (for an orthodox Catholic novel) about some of those temptations and challenges. Young people nowadays pride themselves on wanting straight talk about the big and thorny issues of life, and I have tried to oblige them.

The Mystery of Things can be read on many different levels: as a whodunnit/whydunnit mystery; as a re-working of the St. George-and-the-Dragon myth in a Midwestern setting; as a love story; as a Bard-lover’s concoction of Shakespearean plots and themes dressed up in contemporary clothes. But it is also a novel about the Theology of the Body and a horror story about how the abuse of sexuality leads to the Culture of Death. Like the familiar frog-in-the-water-over-a-bunson-burner experiment, too many of our young people are so inured to the everyday horrors around us that they don’t see the connection between their personal morality and that Culture of Death. The Mystery of Things was written in part to awaken them to those connections, and to offer a powerful alternative: self-sacrificial love.

I hope you all find the story a good read and a satisfying tale. Oh, and when you’re done, pass it along to one of those twenty-somethings—we all know some; sometimes they’re in our own family—in need of some frank talk about Dragons.

God bless,

Debra Murphy