In the early decades of the 20th century, a young Irish American Catholic woman named Margaret Reilly (1884–1937) received a “supernatural mark” on her skin one day while she was at home cooking dinner with her mother on the far upper east side of Manhattan. A raised crucifix appeared over her heart, accompanied by sharp pain. Four years later she joined the convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Peekskill, N.Y. where her mystical experiences and bodily suffering, including the stigmata and ongoing torment by demons, continued until her death in 1937. Although she lived a largely cloistered life, Sister Thorn (as she was named by Jesus himself on the day he imprinted her skin with his crucifix) was famous. Her stigmata and mystical encounters made her a celebrity, as did her fervid promotion of the devotion to the Sacred Heart, through her central role as the creator and distributor of hand-sewn Sacred Heart badges. The focus of intense loyalty as well as suspicion, Sister Thorn was, for a time after her death, regarded as a viable candidate for canonization as the first American saint. While the opportunity to become acquainted with a nearly forgotten but fascinating figure like Sister Thorn would alone have made this book worth reading, Paula Kane does not, as she puts it “paint the portrait of a singular prodigy” (20). Sister Thorn's extreme bodily experiences, and the attention she received for them were exceptional, not typical; however, Kane's deft analysis allows the reader to locate her behaviors and beliefs, as well as her audience, within the rich theological, social, and devotional contexts of the interwar years. The result is nothing less than groundbreaking.

Using varied archival material, both texts and objects, and an interdisciplinary methodology, Kane paints a portrait of the Margaret Reilly herself as well as the context in which she lived and died, and within which her behaviors both created meaning and contested it. Raised in a rigorously devout but still fairly typical New York Irish family, the intensity of Margaret Reilly's lifelong religiosity was met with a combination of irritation, suspicion, and awe. As a child she was trained and encouraged by her teachers and priests to engage in punishing penitential practices, “offering up” her suffering for the souls in purgatory. One of the many strengths of this book is its analysis of the cult of spiritual victimhood which thrived during this time. While it may be hard for us to read of priests whose pastoral advice included ordering young girls to walk in the rain without boots, or to wear hair shirts on Fridays, or nuns who instructed their young charges that they would become saints if they hurt themselves (43), Kane leads us calmly and unflinchingly through this uncomfortable terrain, allowing us to understand these acts of humiliation and abasement within the richly meaningful context in which they took place.

American Catholicism has been studied from many angles in recent decades, however this work represents something we have not yet seen: the role of mysticism and mystical experience among early twentieth-century Catholics who were navigating the tense space between assimilation and the preservation of religious and ethnic identity. As the first American stigmatic, Sister Thorn offered a subset of American Catholics a powerful way to anchor themselves in a torrent of advancing assimilation and modernity which threatened to drown them while it simultaneously attracted them. Sister Thorn was part of, though not wholly representative of, a particular moment of cultural transformation and exchange. Kane's ability to flesh out the implications of the mystical, devotional, theological, social and even economic dimensions of Sister Thorn's life truly represents a major contribution to the study of American religion.

Although Kane's book does not explicitly foreground gender as an interpretive category, this work is rich with insights about American Catholic womanhood and the church's construction of gender. Under suspicion for sexual impropriety as a young woman, involved in at least one jealous love triangle, and the recipient not just of the stigmata but of passionate and erotic encounters with Jesus, Margaret Reilly's body was the locus of both suspicion and vindication, pain and pleasure. During a time which Catholic women were being systematically and vigorously excluded from modernization by the Church, Sister Thorn was emblematic of this anti-modern impulse, and yet she transgressed it as well–refusing silent docility while simultaneously espousing suffering obedience.

This book will open up new avenues of inquiry for scholars American religion broadly as well as for the study of American Catholicism. Seldom does a book come along which changes the landscape of what we thought we knew as dramatically and convincingly as this one does.