Zoya Septet

Andrew Chornavka took on the Trappist's cowl and disappeared from the 21st-century in order to forget the century before. Yet even at the secluded monastery in America, the past finds him. A delegation from the Vatican arrives with questions about his youngest sister, Zoya, who is, to Andrew's shock, a candidate for sainthood. Reluctant, hostile, wanting only to be left alone, to his dairy herd and gardens and prayers, Andrew eventually begins to talk. The talk takes him where he does not wish to go, makes alive again what he had hoped was dead and buried, and makes real what had long ago been lost. He knows what he has to tell is no more than a story about a family that tried to stay together, and keep love strong, when everything on earth tried to rip that love apart. Yet he also knows the archbishop wants a story about an angel who walked with God. But, Andrew did not experience a world of angels and miracles and fairy tales. And neither did his sister Zo. Or, did she?

Exquisitely written, the tale is as simple as it is complex in its scope. Freeman Chernenko's maternal grandmother, a Ukrainian immigrant to America, is known in the Russian Orthodox Church as a saint because of her Joan-of-Arc-like role during World War Two. Having gone to fight in the present conflict among Russia, Ukraine, and Ukraine rebels, Freeman is assigned to defend a shrine to St. Zoya. A religious skeptic, Freeman is shocked to discover his ancestry and doubts it, finding himself in a spiritual dilemma amid an enemy, troops defending the shrine among wheat and sunflower fields, nuns, monks, miraculous healings, meadowlark twitterings, Van Gogh-like paintings, passionate love and bloody combat.