Ron Hansen fans will rejoice over this review from Carolyn See of Hansen's new book, Exiles:

Here's this amazing book I'm going to tell you about; try to keep your mind off your grandmother's road trip. Forget that you might not be Catholic or that you've had it with the clergy or that you don't care about a 19th-century shipwreck or that you don't read poetry. Remember that although Ron Hansen wrote about the stigmata in "Mariette in Ecstasy," he also wrote about the assassination of Jesse James by the dirty little coward Robert Ford. Instead of thinking about the upcoming election or whether you prefer blue cheese to ranch, unhinge your mind and let it trip, as we used to say in the '60s.

Follow Hansen to a snowy seminary in Wales some 150 years ago, where a high-strung, highly educated former scholar from Oxford has converted to unfashionable Catholicism and believes in it. He believes in the whole shebang. He believes in "The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe." The world is divine to him -- shot through with grace. He once had a gift for poetry, but he has given it up; to be too much involved with things of this world would, he feels, be an insult to God.

Then he reads of the shipwreck that killed, among others, those five German nuns, who, because the German government had been going through a spasm of anti-Catholicism, had been dispatched to be missionaries in Missouri. It's sad that they died, of course. And yet -- if you believe in the reality of God -- shouldn't it be a happy occasion when some of God's chosen return to Him? Hopkins's superior suggests to the young priest-poet that he write a poem about it. He does, but it comes out garbled, strange, even a little creepy -- embarrassing in its intense, private declaration of love. Here was a man who was absolutely gaga about Jesus and didn't care who knew it.

That's only part of the review, which opens with a first-person account of See trying to convince friends of the book's merits. The responses will resonate with anyone who's ever met complacency in such ventures (who hasn't?).

My husband is reading this right now and really enjoying it.

Paul Mariani has a Hopkins biography coming out this October. Husband loved Mariani's bio of Hart Crane, and can't wait to pair that with the Hansen novel.

Sara: Did your husband like it when he was finished with it? I found it somewhat ... removed, for the first half. I thought I'd identify deeply with these religious characters, but something about the book, which I actually read in paper-and-ink (didn't listen to in audio form, which is my usual form of "reading" these days), kept me at a distance. I thought about not finishing it, but the book is short, even for a slow reader like me.

I pressed on, and am glad I did. The wreck of the ship and the demise of several characters is wrenching and vivid, in a good way. I guess it won't surprise folks that the book it most reminded me of was The Perfect Storm, a lesser literary work that shares this book's ability to conjure gutwrenching stories of human helplessness when set against the power of the sea.