Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Little, Brown and Company (2016), Edition: First Edition, 400 pages
Description
"St. Peter's Square, Rome. White smoke signals that a new Pope has been chosen. Is it possible that the new Pope is a woman? The world is watching as historic crowds gather in Rome, waiting for news of a new Pope, one who promises to be unlike any other in the Church's history. Some followers are ecstatic, but the leading candidate has made a legion of powerful enemies. From a difficult childhood with drug addled parents, to a career as a doctor on the front lines in Sudan, to a series of trials that test her faith at every turn, Brigid Fitzgerald's convictions and callings have made her the target of all those who fear that the Church has lost its way dangerous adversaries who abhor challenges to tradition. Locked in a deadly, high-stakes battle with forces determined to undermine everything she believes in, Brigid must convert her enemies to her cause before she loses her faith and her life"--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member jfe16
Woman of God chronicles the tragedy-filled life of Brigid Fitzgerald. As the story opens, she is practicing “meatball surgery” in war-torn South Sudan. Heartbreak fills her life; eventually she returns home to Boston where she meets a Catholic priest accused of child sexual abuse. Believing in
Is the voice that Brigid sometimes hears prove to be, as she believes, the voice of God? Or is it nothing more than a vivid imagination? How will Brigid’s experiences and changes in her life affect those around her?
While this intriguing story posits some changes in the Church in order to tell its tale, it is less about those changes and more about Brigid’s faith. As the intrepid heroine of the narrative, she encounters far more tragedy than might seem to be realistic. But the story isn’t about the tragedy, per se; it’s about Brigid’s reaction to it, about her personal journey of faith. Readers will find themselves crying with her and cheering her triumphs. Taking the journey with Brigid will keep those pages turning in this unputdownable tale.
Highly recommended.
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his innocence, Brigid supports him even though the local church leaders have made him a scapegoat. Is the voice that Brigid sometimes hears prove to be, as she believes, the voice of God? Or is it nothing more than a vivid imagination? How will Brigid’s experiences and changes in her life affect those around her?
While this intriguing story posits some changes in the Church in order to tell its tale, it is less about those changes and more about Brigid’s faith. As the intrepid heroine of the narrative, she encounters far more tragedy than might seem to be realistic. But the story isn’t about the tragedy, per se; it’s about Brigid’s reaction to it, about her personal journey of faith. Readers will find themselves crying with her and cheering her triumphs. Taking the journey with Brigid will keep those pages turning in this unputdownable tale.
Highly recommended.
Show Less
LibraryThing member thewanderingjew
A Woman of God, James Patterson, Maxine Paetro, authors; Therese Plummer, narrator
While I found the book interesting because of the content, which was partly about volunteering one’s time and working in the South Sudan to help those less fortunate, I found Brigid Fitzgerald to be a totally
The book begins 20 years in the future with an attempt on Brigid Fitzgerald’s life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It then moves to the present day where she is found at a place called Kind Hands, in the South Sudan. She is young, unmarried, childless, and she is working in a dangerous place where medical facilities are almost always poorly equipped and also poorly defended from attacks by brutal, hostile gangs. There she falls in love with Colin who is killed because of her foolishness. They are in the middle of a terrible attack, with bullets coming at them from all sides, when she insists he help her in a futile attempt to evacuate a mortally wounded man, although there are thousands of other wounded, dying and dead all around her. During the attempt, a bullet finds Colin who is then mortally wounded. She herself sustains devastating wounds. After a long recovery, she goes to a close friend in Italy, and begins to work again. She meets another man, Karl Lenz. He is much older than she is, but they fall in love and have a child. They live in Berlin and are wonderfully happy. Both the child and father die suddenly when he suffers a heart attack, falls down a flight of steps and gravely injures the child in the process. After the death of both, she returns to South Sudan and helps to capture the brutal leader of the Gray Army which is a wild, roaming militia. Colonel Dage Zuberi is responsible for the brutal death of many in the South Sudan, and she is given credit for bringing him down.
After recovering from that harrowing experience, she begins to work with Prism, a drug rehab center. There she meets a priest accused of improper conduct with a student, a male student. The church refuses to back him up, but she believes in him and engages a lawyer. Eventually, after his acquittal, James leaves the church and begins a new movement called JMJ. The Jesus, Mary and Joseph movement is dedicated to more openness and freedom. Women can be ordained, members of the clergy may marry. They believe that Jesus would have welcomed that idea. James and Brigit decide to marry and they build a JMJ church where James officiates. When James professed his love for her, Brigid was once again surprised that someone loved her. She then suddenly realized that she was also in love with him. They have a child, Gilly, and their church thrives. However, the Catholic Church threatens James with excommunication and worse. They will paint him as a pervert unless they stop the movement. As the JMJ church grows and gains more followers, some in the church hierarchy grow even angrier. When James dies suddenly from an aneurism, Brigid once again suffers a loss and rails against G-d, questioning why he seems to grant her happiness only to take it away. Why would G-d do that? When Brigid is ordained, she begins to perform services in their church. Occasionally, she believes that G-d is communicating with her. This is a constant theme in the book.
Is Brigid’s uncanny ability to communicate with G-d after suffering a head injury real? She wonders if this is really happening to her or if she is imagining it. She wonders about it, even as the reader is wondering with her. Why would G-d communicate with her, and what would G-d’s message to her mean? When she was suddenly summoned to the Vatican, she wondered why the Pope would summon her. Their conversation is even more bizarre than the rest of the book. They both have the same kinds of conversations with G-d.
When the idea of a woman Pope in introduced, one truly has to suspend disbelief, and even then, it is hard to believe it. The story lines simply feel completely implausible, and the path from Brigit’s medical career to a divinity career, to rumor’s of her being Pope, even after having a child, are just out of the realm of possibility. The book was way too melodramatic for me and way too unrealistic. Brigid never seemed to be fully aware of what her actions would cause, or of what her own circumstances actually were, nor did she seem to learn from any experiences she had. She seemed to make the same mistakes over and over. Yet, she seemed to be loved by all, almost as a saint, and is given credit for things that make no apparent sense and do not seem to be the result of any logical progression. Also, Brigid seems to fall in and out of love with abandon, almost without her knowing it. Suddenly she realizes how much she loves the person who is proposing, only as he is proposing. Even after James dies, a former acquaintance, Zach, reenters her life, and she enjoys his company too. If I were Zach, I would steer clear of her. Everyone she marries or loves suddenly dies. Although she is described as someone who is not a great beauty, there must be something wonderful about her to make so many men and others fall in with her. She is extremely kind and compassionate and is dedicated to saving life even at the risk of her own, but she is also arrogant and headstrong to a fault and her sometimes seeming irrational behavior actually caused the death of others. I was disappointed with the book because the theory of a woman Pope is simply not in the realm of reality in the current day and twenty years into the future is also too short a time for such epiphanies to occur.
While I found the book interesting because of the content, which was partly about volunteering one’s time and working in the South Sudan to help those less fortunate, I found Brigid Fitzgerald to be a totally
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implausible character. The authors overplayed their hands by portraying her innocence and potential godliness without giving her real substance in that regard. I found her experiences of falling in and out of love so frequently, each time expressing disbelief about being loved,, highly implausible. They made her seem shallow. As far as her being chosen by G-d to be a conduit, it seemed totally far-fetched. She never seemed to rise to that level of saintliness, and she had no real attachment to religion in any truly religious sense for most of her life. She believed in her faith, but she rarely practiced it. Still, as human beings go, she did have a Mother Theresa aspect to her. She sacrificed her life for others, placed herself in grave danger knowing full well she might be killed, and she chose to do this over having a lucrative medical practice. She was highly trained and very capable, but she was more dedicated to caring for others and more loyal to her friends than she was to her church or the making of money. She remained dedicated to the friends, patients and friends she made during the years she worked in Africa. The book begins 20 years in the future with an attempt on Brigid Fitzgerald’s life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It then moves to the present day where she is found at a place called Kind Hands, in the South Sudan. She is young, unmarried, childless, and she is working in a dangerous place where medical facilities are almost always poorly equipped and also poorly defended from attacks by brutal, hostile gangs. There she falls in love with Colin who is killed because of her foolishness. They are in the middle of a terrible attack, with bullets coming at them from all sides, when she insists he help her in a futile attempt to evacuate a mortally wounded man, although there are thousands of other wounded, dying and dead all around her. During the attempt, a bullet finds Colin who is then mortally wounded. She herself sustains devastating wounds. After a long recovery, she goes to a close friend in Italy, and begins to work again. She meets another man, Karl Lenz. He is much older than she is, but they fall in love and have a child. They live in Berlin and are wonderfully happy. Both the child and father die suddenly when he suffers a heart attack, falls down a flight of steps and gravely injures the child in the process. After the death of both, she returns to South Sudan and helps to capture the brutal leader of the Gray Army which is a wild, roaming militia. Colonel Dage Zuberi is responsible for the brutal death of many in the South Sudan, and she is given credit for bringing him down.
After recovering from that harrowing experience, she begins to work with Prism, a drug rehab center. There she meets a priest accused of improper conduct with a student, a male student. The church refuses to back him up, but she believes in him and engages a lawyer. Eventually, after his acquittal, James leaves the church and begins a new movement called JMJ. The Jesus, Mary and Joseph movement is dedicated to more openness and freedom. Women can be ordained, members of the clergy may marry. They believe that Jesus would have welcomed that idea. James and Brigit decide to marry and they build a JMJ church where James officiates. When James professed his love for her, Brigid was once again surprised that someone loved her. She then suddenly realized that she was also in love with him. They have a child, Gilly, and their church thrives. However, the Catholic Church threatens James with excommunication and worse. They will paint him as a pervert unless they stop the movement. As the JMJ church grows and gains more followers, some in the church hierarchy grow even angrier. When James dies suddenly from an aneurism, Brigid once again suffers a loss and rails against G-d, questioning why he seems to grant her happiness only to take it away. Why would G-d do that? When Brigid is ordained, she begins to perform services in their church. Occasionally, she believes that G-d is communicating with her. This is a constant theme in the book.
Is Brigid’s uncanny ability to communicate with G-d after suffering a head injury real? She wonders if this is really happening to her or if she is imagining it. She wonders about it, even as the reader is wondering with her. Why would G-d communicate with her, and what would G-d’s message to her mean? When she was suddenly summoned to the Vatican, she wondered why the Pope would summon her. Their conversation is even more bizarre than the rest of the book. They both have the same kinds of conversations with G-d.
When the idea of a woman Pope in introduced, one truly has to suspend disbelief, and even then, it is hard to believe it. The story lines simply feel completely implausible, and the path from Brigit’s medical career to a divinity career, to rumor’s of her being Pope, even after having a child, are just out of the realm of possibility. The book was way too melodramatic for me and way too unrealistic. Brigid never seemed to be fully aware of what her actions would cause, or of what her own circumstances actually were, nor did she seem to learn from any experiences she had. She seemed to make the same mistakes over and over. Yet, she seemed to be loved by all, almost as a saint, and is given credit for things that make no apparent sense and do not seem to be the result of any logical progression. Also, Brigid seems to fall in and out of love with abandon, almost without her knowing it. Suddenly she realizes how much she loves the person who is proposing, only as he is proposing. Even after James dies, a former acquaintance, Zach, reenters her life, and she enjoys his company too. If I were Zach, I would steer clear of her. Everyone she marries or loves suddenly dies. Although she is described as someone who is not a great beauty, there must be something wonderful about her to make so many men and others fall in with her. She is extremely kind and compassionate and is dedicated to saving life even at the risk of her own, but she is also arrogant and headstrong to a fault and her sometimes seeming irrational behavior actually caused the death of others. I was disappointed with the book because the theory of a woman Pope is simply not in the realm of reality in the current day and twenty years into the future is also too short a time for such epiphanies to occur.
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LibraryThing member Bauernfeind
Odd story in that what you thought the book would be about turns out to be something completely different despite the lead in chapter. Weird story of essentially a female doctor who is committed to saving lives in Africa
LibraryThing member kamikaze2011
I'm not really a religious person, but even I found this to be an extraordinary book. I read reviews that complain of too many "bad things" happening to Brigid, but the book spans a roughly 20 year period, and, when you think about it, life is often full of "bad things" happening year after year
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after year. That said, Brigid handles it all expertly and is an inspiration to women, faithful and faithless alike. Show Less
LibraryThing member DanieXJ
That was not what I was a expecting from a James Patterson and Maxine Paetro. I've read all of their Women's Murder Club books, so I thought I'd give this one a try too.
It was definitely different.
It's the story of Brigid. She's a doctor who goes back and forth between the horror of South Sudan and
Along the way she finds herself maybe in the running to be the first female Pope, falling in love with a Catholic Priest, and going through many other things that have her alternatively questioning and being sure of her faith.
And that's what it was, a book about Faith. I thought it was a very well balanced and doesn't come off as preachy or evangelical. It works no matter where on the religious spectrum you are.
A short read (it's still a Patterson), and one that definitely made me think.
It was definitely different.
It's the story of Brigid. She's a doctor who goes back and forth between the horror of South Sudan and
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the Western World.Along the way she finds herself maybe in the running to be the first female Pope, falling in love with a Catholic Priest, and going through many other things that have her alternatively questioning and being sure of her faith.
And that's what it was, a book about Faith. I thought it was a very well balanced and doesn't come off as preachy or evangelical. It works no matter where on the religious spectrum you are.
A short read (it's still a Patterson), and one that definitely made me think.
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LibraryThing member LivelyLady
Co-authored book with Patterson about a woman who feels called to be a priest. Good back ground of her good works and her personal life, but moves to fast to develop much. He mentioned the documentary PINK SMOKE OVER THE VATICAN but I didn't see reference to it otherwise. It is a real documentary.
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Maybe since I got the large print book it wasn't there. I think the co-author sold herself out to Patterson. Show Less
LibraryThing member chickadee2
Don't forget it is a novel and not Biblical...just a good story.
LibraryThing member BingeReader87
This was a pretty great book. It tells the story of Brigid Fitzgerald, a Catholic doctor who experiences some of the worst times in her life and overcomes them thanks to her ongoing connection to God. It is a really moving and inspirational story. I highly recommend this book to anyone who believes
Throughout this book, you are treated to multiple instances of religious persecution and how it's handled by the strong-willed and faithful. This was really a magnificent book and probably my new favorite James Patterson work.
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in God or is struggling with their faith. Throughout this book, you are treated to multiple instances of religious persecution and how it's handled by the strong-willed and faithful. This was really a magnificent book and probably my new favorite James Patterson work.
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LibraryThing member delphimo
I enjoy James Patterson's style of writing with the short chapters and the rapid action. This book begins with the death of the Pope, and the possibility of a woman becoming the next Pope. The story follows Brigid Fitzgerald in her travels to South Sudan, Egypt, Italy, France, and various states of
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The United States. Much of the book focuses on the terrible conditions and horrible events of South Sudan. Brigid, as a medical doctor, attempts to save these desperate people. Brigid endures loss of many cherished friends and family but keeps hammering away at helping others. Sometimes, Brigid seems more beloved than Mother Teresa, Patterson's gives Brigid too many "superhuman" characteristics, and the story suffers. Show Less
LibraryThing member HeatherLINC
"Woman of God" is totally different from other James Patterson books I've read, but it did have the short chapters, excellent story-telling and page-turning excitement synonymous with Patterson. This book follows the adult life of Brigid Fitzgerald, a remarkable woman who starts off as a doctor in
Having been to both Africa and Italy, and visiting Vatican City, I loved the descriptions of these amazing places, and they brought back wonderful memories as the author enabled me to revisit them in my mind.
My biggest criticism with "Woman of God" was the number of tragedies Brigid faced. They were truly of biblical proportions, similar to what Job had to endure, and were just too numerous to be believable. However, I do recommend this book as a thought-provoking, quick read that challenges the age-old traditions of the Catholic Church.
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Sudan, becomes a female Catholic priest then a candidate for the next Pope. Throughout her life's journey Brigid risks her life, faces adversity, questions her faith, falls in love and rants to God.Having been to both Africa and Italy, and visiting Vatican City, I loved the descriptions of these amazing places, and they brought back wonderful memories as the author enabled me to revisit them in my mind.
My biggest criticism with "Woman of God" was the number of tragedies Brigid faced. They were truly of biblical proportions, similar to what Job had to endure, and were just too numerous to be believable. However, I do recommend this book as a thought-provoking, quick read that challenges the age-old traditions of the Catholic Church.
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LibraryThing member Preston.Kringle
Woman of God is unlike anything that James Patterson has written, to a point that the reader forgets whom has written it. Telling the story of Bridget,whom is rumored to be the first woman Pope, getting shot and then traveling backwards 20years to what lead her to that point in time. Bridget is a
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strong character however looses a lot every few pages at some points creating bad just prior to the reader making a connection to the surroundings. Show Less
LibraryThing member standhenry
Woman of God is jam packed with the life experiences of Brigid Fitzgerald. She is humble, educated, driven, and filled with empathy for her fellow mankind. The details and action in Africa and Italy are so spot on that I had to double check that this was a fiction book. The storytelling brings you
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directing into the action and at times it was difficult to put the book down. By the end of the book, I was torn between wondering how Brigid could go on with so many onslaughts of misery, and reveling in how she actually does deal with it all. She's amazing. I hope there are really people like this in the world! Show Less
LibraryThing member rmarcin
I enjoyed reading this book about a woman who was very spiritual. Brigid is a doctor working in South Sudan, Africa, a war torn country. Many things happen to her, taking her through Europe and then back to her home in Boston. Throughout the book, Bridget is faced with many trials, yet she
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constantly turns to God. Sometimes she loses her faith, but later regains it. Will this woman of God become the first female pope? It is an interesting book on certain traditions in the Catholic faith and how they might evolve in the future. Show Less
LibraryThing member JillsWorld5
James Patterson and Maxine Paetro have given us another solid hit with Woman of God! This is definitely not the typical James Patterson novel with all the mystery and crime. This is an inspiring story about one woman whose faith has been tested over and over again. It's about tragedy, love, hope
A well-written and inspiring story that I highly recommend!
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and learning how to overcome it all through faith. Often through our darkest times is when our faith is being tested, you can either hold on to it or lose faith altogether. A well-written and inspiring story that I highly recommend!
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Original language
English
Physical description
400 p.; 10 inches
ISBN
031627402X / 9780316274029