"Sister Lumberjack"
Candace Simar, North Star Press (2024)
450 pages, $22.
How does someone find God in a life that looks like a mess? And can God really use messy people to accomplish his will?
These are the questions posed by Candace Simar's "Sister Lumberjack," Catholic Media Association's 2025 third-place winner for Catholic novel, set in a logging camp over the course of one fateful winter in 1893-1894.
The novel follows the experiences of three main characters: Nels Jensen, a young Danish immigrant struggling to get his life back on track after a run of bad luck; Solveig Rognaldson, an elderly widow suffering from the loss of her husband and betrayal by her son; and the titular "Sister Lumberjack," Sister Magdalena, a 6-foot-tall Benedictine on a mission from God (or at least from St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth). All three of their paths converge at Starkweather Timber, a ramshackle camp in the woods of Minnesota.
Logging is dangerous work, and lumberjacks who are injured on the job can face crippling hospital bills. When a dying patient begs Sister Magdalena to take care of his pregnant wife, the nun conceives of a plan: If every lumberjack were to buy a hospital chit, the costs of care for the unlucky could be spread out more evenly among the fortunate.
Armed with this plan for an early form of insurance, the sister ventures out into the heart of the woods. But logging camps are a man's world, and even a 6-foot farmgirl-turned-bride of Christ is sure to face her share of difficulties.
No stranger to difficulties, Jensen has also come to the logging camps to try to make his fortune, hoping this time it will stick. Afflicted by alcohol use disorder during an era when treatment options are minimal, Jensen has vowed to get clean, and hopefully not lose his next paycheck to alcohol or roadhouse thieves. But a vicious lie has ruined his reputation at the larger camps, and landed him at Starkweather Timber, where every corner is cut and all is not as it seems. A poor man and an immigrant, wrongfully slandered, Jensen has no one in his corner but himself -- or so he thinks, until a 6-foot "penguin" takes an interest in him.
Another lonely soul, Rognaldson has found herself in her old age broke, widowed and abandoned, with the last mortgage payment still due in spring on the farm she and her husband have worked all their lives. Rognaldson's son has recently moved to town with his new wife, rather than taking up lumberjacking like his father to make the final payment.
Spurning his offer to come with him and let the bank foreclose on her farm, Rognaldson instead marches into the logging camps herself and demands a job. Hired on as a cook's assistant and then cook proper, the shaky financials of Starkweather Timber soon turn that stroke of good luck into a disaster. Rognaldson has troubles enough to manage -- and that's before Sister Lumberjack starts sending needy souls to her kitchen.
"Sister Lumberjack" is a historical novel that nonetheless feels fresh and relevant. The imperfections of the characters and the multitude of injustices in their world will no doubt feel quite familiar to a modern audience.
The novel doesn't sugarcoat the moral failures of the era, and more sensitive readers may find themselves uncomfortable with the period-typical sexism, racial slurs and violence within its pages. Its thesis, however, remains perennial: With a little good cheer and a lot of hope, we can believe that God really does work in what seem like intractable messes -- and that oftentimes, we ourselves are his tools for doing so.
Madelyn Reichert is publications administrative coordinator at The Catholic Spirit, the official publication of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Caption: This is the cover of "Sister Lumberjack" (North Star Press) by Candace Simar. The book was the Catholic Media Association's 2025 third place winner for Catholic novel. (OSV News photo/North Star Press)
