The end (highlight blank spaces for spoilers): Y’all know I cannot resist finding out what nefarious torments Tildy and/or Maud and/or Chloe devised to make each other/the other girls in their school/their teachers/Mother Ravenal miserable. It turns out they tried to catch the conscience of the headmistress during a play they were putting on; and then one of the teachers died (seems like pre-existing condition?), and I guess after that Mother Ravenal had a leave of absence to, like, renew her conscience? Unclear.

I had to page through a lot of chatter and gossip from the grown-up versions of the characters. I like knowing what happens to everybody, but it feels info-dumpy. Maybe I will have a different response to it when I read it in sequence.

I’m not sure about all this. I thought there was going to be a Shocking Reveal and Drastic Fallout, and there doesn’t seem to be any of that. I thought it was a book about Shocking Secrets!! Where are my Shocking Secrets! I want my Shocking Secrets!

The whole: I was partly right. The ending is kind of info-dumpy. And there indeed are not Shocking Secrets. But it turns out that Gail Godwin is really writing about something that’s kind of incompatible with Shocking Secrets. She’s writing about the harm that good people do to each other in the course of their lives; and how even when the harm you have done is irrevocable, it’s not a disaster and you don’t stop changing and growing and moving closer to being the person you’re supposed to be.

Though many disputes arise throughout Unfinished Desires, there is a bad guy in none of them. Maud and Tildy fight when Maud goes away for the summer, and from Tildy’s perspective it seems like Maud is being nasty; but when you see it on Maud’s side you can see exactly what happened. The same is true of Mother Ravenal and her reaction to the play — she caused harm to some of the girls under her care, but not malicious harm, and they recovered and she recovered, and they are all works in progress even to the very end of Mother Ravenal’s life. The only bad guy in the book is also one of only a few false notes for me, Tildy’s mother, Cornelia. She is purely spiteful and the engine of much of the conflict in the book, and I thought the book would have done just fine without that.

A good feature of the book is that Catholicism features prominently, but it’s neither demonized nor exalted. Godwin depicts the goodness in Catholicism, and the harm also. Like anything — a play, a prop, a sketchbook — its force for good or bad just depends on whose hands it’s in.

Having just praised Godwin’s measured way of writing, I will say that it felt a teeeeeeny bit bloodless at times. Call me a hypocrite, I know I deserve it! But there you go. No matter how dramatic the circumstances, the book refused to be dramatic about them, even a little bit. I got finished with Unfinished Desires and wanted to read about some finished desires, dammit, and I went to the library and read The Scarlet Pimpernel. And it was amazing.

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