Veiled Resistance

Helen Eano

PROSE

Prejudice marked Helen Eano’s early years on the Canadian prairies. She was the only child of a mixed Catholic-Protestant marriage. The bitter hatred that had festered during eight centuries of English occupation of Ireland had been carried across the Atlantic to Canada. Eano was caught in the crossfire, a perennial outsider in either group. No longer a focus of prejudice herself, Eano reaches out to people who are marginalized. Not surprisingly, her debut novel follows this theme.

Veiled Resistance takes place in World War II France. Prejudice against the Jews is held by some of the “best people” in Europe, prejudice that grows into the horror of the Holocaust. An idealistic young nun, Mary Stephen joins other brave nuns who resist their mother superior, the French police and the Germans in order to protect Jews and other vulnerable people caught in the Nazi juggernaut. The nuns join forces with a fierce half- Jewish teenager, a too-trusting priest and a resistance fighter who was once engaged to the most beautiful nun, Sister Denise.

The reader is carried at a breath-taking pace through the siege of Lille, the fall of Paris, and a safe house in Burgundy. Will Sister Mary Stephen remain a nun? And will Sister Denise be able to resist the proposal of marriage a second time?