THE PROFIT OF HER FELLOWSHIP

About the Book

In 1971, Sister Martha Louise acts as headmistress at Our Lady of the Perpetual Covenant Academy, a down-on-its luck boarding school for girls, one of them seventeen-year-old Petranella Funk. In alternating accounts, the fiery nun and timid teenage girl recall that pivotal year, when Lila Rupert arrives at the school. Where Lila goes, chaos follows, and soon the orderly boredom of Covenant Academy is forever disrupted. Love simultaneously beckons and threatens, friendships offer redemption and ruin, and long buried secrets emerge which hold the power to heal or to destroy. Caught up in the whirlwind of social changes sweeping through American society during a turbulent decade, and wrestling with the mercurial personality who is Lila, Sister Martha Louise and Petranella must, in separate but intersecting scenarios, reevaluate long accepted traditions and beliefs as each struggles to come to terms with what she holds sacred. Not just the young doubt and are capable of change, and even the most daunting and sober individual may hide a delightfully rebellious streak and painful regrets, as this poignant and often humorous tale of days gone by reveals.

About the Author

Born the same year as wild Lila Rupert and staid Petranella Funk, Celia Crotteau, like her fictional characters, attended a convent-run boarding school for girls. Students held one particular nun in awe, and about that daunting individual uncorroborated rumors and stories swirled. Although long dead, she continues to serve as a nexus between alumnae when they gather to remember their school days. It is on her still prevailing influence, and memories both happy and sad, that this work of fiction is based.