Bonomo's month-by-month journal of a year among Benedictine monks invites comparison with Kathleen Norris's 1996 award-winning bestseller, The Cloister Walk, though the two books differ markedly in tone and content. Both authors are middle-aged, married oblates (vowed laypersons) in the Order of St. Benedict. But while Norris's wide-ranging essays may idealize monasticism, Bonomo's reflections spare no one, taking aim at boring homilies, inadequate hospitality, polyurethane upholstery and, above all, her own self-described crankiness. Yet Bonomo, an overscheduled speechwriter, clearly loves St. Augustine's Abbey, where for several days each month she makes a personal retreat. Her lifelong rootlessness no longer appeals to her: "I seem to have been born slamming doors shut behind me and then wondering where everybody went." Tired of false starts and sudden endings, she doggedly pursues stability, a hallmark of the Benedictine vow. Throughout, Bonomo deftly interweaves her personal story—her alcoholism, her father's sudden death, her persistent fear of being an outsider—with cryptic tales from the fourth-century desert fathers and mothers, principles from the 20th-century Twelve Step movement and wisdom from all 73 chapters of the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict. As in a good novel, her character develops believably. Without forsaking her acerbic wit, Bonomo eventually finds a father figure in the kindly nonagenarian abbot, a home in the abbey and its Rule, and the beginnings of stability: "This year, for once, I stayed still." A down-to-earth spiritual journey memoir, this book is also a painless introduction to the Rule of St. Benedict. (Aug.)
