Catherine Coldstream's Cloistered is a very honest inside look at the turmoil inside a specific cloistered nunnery in the UK. Coldstream went into the cloister to let her faith become the model for her life. The Carmelite order's focus on prayer, work and simplicity seemed tailor-made for her needs. She discovered, however, that some of the women in this particular order had other goals in mind that seemed the opposite of what the order theoretically specified, goals that were destructive and hurtful to the order, and to Catherine personally.

You know from the opening pages that Catherine leaves the order. The rest of the book carefully details why.

An excellent if sobering read.

United States Publication: March 12, 2024

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for this advanced reader's copy. In exchange, I am providing an honest review.
(Of note, I do not assign ratings to memoirs but because NetGalley requests one I have assigned a rating to fulfill this feedback request. Nowhere else I have reviewed this title will there be a rating assigned.)

Shaken to her core after the death of her father, Catherine Coldstream sought solace from her grief in the structure and confines of religion. Making a very thoughtful and committed decision, Catherine became a nun, taking a vow of silence. For the next 12 years, Catherine was a nun at Akenside Priory, a Roman Catholic contemplative convent. Lest you think this was in the 1950s or some long ago era, it wasn't. This was in the 1990s, more modern times, that Coldstream detached herself from the world for God. And it was in the early 2000s that she escaped that silent world back into the noise of life.

Catherine recounts for the reader the way in which she found Akenside Priory and the nuns she would come to be in community with for the next 12 years following her decision to separate herself from the world, and in theory her grief. She recalls the first days, weeks, and months as a novice, living her way toward taking final vows. She pulls the curtain back on how even in a cloistered community politics and power plays can drive how the Priory is run. Conflict surfaces among the various personalities that have entered into this holy union with God and soon Catherine finds herself in the midst of a very divided Priory, fueling the doubts she was already beginning to have about this cloistered life she chose to live. Coldstream finally decides to make a break with her vows and her religion and flees, on foot, the Priory one lonely night, reentering the world she had rejected 12 years before.

This was a really interesting and compelling look into the life of a nun. I think a lot of people are very curious about what it is really like behind those closed doors and Coldstream generously shares her very personal experience. Amazingly enough, many years later she has more fondness than not for the time she spent in Akenside and most of her fellow Sisters, even the ones who she was at odds with. Post-religious life she's married and even still occasionally attends services at her local Roman Catholic parish, which I find fascinating because many people who have been that deep into a religious community generally reject it completely. I would actually love to read a follow-up memoir from Coldstream on her post-religious order life now that she's been living it for as many years as she was in the Priory.

Author Catherine Coldstream converted to Catholicism in a fit of religious zeal mixed with grief after her beloved father's death. She thought that sisterhood in the austere Carmelite order would fulfill her spiritual and intellectual needs. She couldn't have been more wrong. The traditional community valued manual labor over theological study and mindless obedience over spiritual growth. The powerful prioress Mother Elizabeth and her favorites, known as "the gang," made up their own rules and delighted in gaslighting their rivals.

You don't have to be Roman Catholic or know anything in particular about the Carmelite order to appreciate this compelling psychological study of an isolated, dysfunctional community. Many of Coldstream's observations would apply to corporations, clubs, and any other organizations where there are strong pulls towards authoritarian leadership and stagnation in the name of "that's the way we've always done it."

This insightful book is the best one I've read in a long time. Highly recommended.

I received an electronic copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I was not compensated in any way.

I wasn't able to finish this book. I think I was expecting something different. I wish the author well.

I picked up this book because it sounded fascinating! Plus, this is a POV of a life I know nothing about, and it's a glimpse into that type of life choice. While some parts of the book were dull and hard to keep focused on the book there were other aspects that I enjoyed. I love that the author was able to find herself and decide what she truly wanted in life and that is something that many of us do not achieve in this lifetime!
One thing that bothered me is that Coldstream went with everything and did not question it. There was a lot of mental abuse and while this had an extreme eye-opening effect there should have been someone to speak up to stop the abuse. The ones that were supposed to serve as mentors so to speak were horrible to her, instead of showing love and compassion they ruled with an iron fist and thought that they were above everyone in the manner that Colstream was beneath her. I hated that aspect. I do not think all covenants are like this, it's the people involved that can make it or break it like many other aspects of our life. The experience Coldstream experienced was like nothing I would have thought it would be like. If you are looking for a thought-provoking book about the experiences a nun might have then this should definitely be the next book you pick up!
I was given the opportunity to read and review this book by St. Martin's Press and NetGalley and for that, I am extremely grateful for this eye-opening experience.

"On my second afternoon", writes Coldstream of a visit to the priory where she would later take vows, "there was a thunderstorm, and the women I saw from my window, flitting across courtyards in their long brown robes, were like ghosts. They barely spoke and their pale faces were as inscrutable as distant moons. I saw them as brave, extraordinary, martyr figures. They belonged to the same forgotten world as the moss growing out of the ancient enclosure wall, and as the ferns that grew, unchecked, at its base, and the dandelions and smaller flowers peeping from its crevices. They belonged to the fields and forests. Above all, they belonged to the silence, and to God. I opened the window. The smell of damp earth rose, reeking of something half forgotten, mixed with spring." (loc. 885*)

Coldstream was perhaps an unusual choice to be a nun: raised in an artistic and academic, non-Catholic household, she took to Catholicism only after her father died and her world upended itself. But when she went in, it was all or nothing: not just Catholicism but a nun, not just a nun but one in a cloistered, largely silent community. And she loved it—loved the silence, loved the isolation, loved the intense focus on religion, loved the honeymoon phase and weathered the loss of that same phase.

"Time passes in the monastery like ghosts that move through walls; it seeps through cell doors and stony archways, through bone and marrow, imprinting patience and endurance at every touch. With the shifting of the seasons, and by our second dusky-coloured autumn, we'd turned from eager novices, excited by the novelty of monasticism, to heavy labourers, hands chapped from toil, lips cracked with cold, and faces raw." (loc. 1298)

But nuns, too, are only human, and eventually those cracks spread outward, and outward still, and gradually things changed.

Coldstream is at her best when writing about those early years, and the beauty she found in the bareness and silence of the monastery. She mentions few of the early red flags that many ex-nuns who lived in particularly restrictive (or just pre–Vatican II) describe, and a sense of longing and "what if" remains: what if this had happened within the community, or that, or if this sister had been given more leeway or that sister less, or if she had begun her journey in a different convent or chosen a less closed order to begin with—would she still be there? Without going into too much detail, I think it's fair to say that it was the bare humanity of isolated religious life that made questions start to grow, and then to proliferate.

Coldstream took a series of vows en route to becoming a fully professed nun, and it left me thinking about the strange way that the Catholic church (or at least some streams of it) makes convent life into a marriage, with each nun in her marial cell and Jesus as the ultimate bigamist...Coldstream didn't go down the aisle in a white gown, as used to be more common, but even if she had that would not have been anywhere near the most final of her vows—which is not the way the church treats a more conventional marriage, leaving me puzzled about why they would put the marriage-to-Jesus bit relatively early in the process. Not for the first time, I find myself thinking that the Catholic church might do better to encourage temporary vows (much the way there are so many short-term Buddhist monks) rather than, as Coldstream describes, making the process a long one but one that nearly always has a goal of permanence. Because—how might Coldstream's journey, or those of any of the women she lived in community with, have been different with the doors still open?

Not always a happy story, but a beautifully written one.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

"Cloistered" by Catherine Coldstream is a captivating historical novel that immerses readers in the cloistered world of a medieval convent. Coldstream's meticulous research and vivid prose bring to life the challenges and triumphs of the nuns as they navigate a world dominated by faith, politics, and personal struggles. The novel is rich in historical detail, offering a fascinating glimpse into a seldom-explored setting. The characters are compelling, each with their own complex motivations. "Cloistered" is a beautifully crafted tale of resilience and female empowerment, inviting readers to reflect on the enduring strength found within the confines of tradition and the human spirit.

I was always fascinated in the life of a Nun especially since one of my Aunts was a Nun but left and the movie "The Nun's story," with Audrey Hepburn, and this story filled in all the blanks of why women would give their lives up for a spiritual life. I like how the story described the daily life of Catherine a Carmelite nun, that learned what she had to do to devote herself to Christ, and it seems that she found what she was looking for in terms of devotion to God, through silence, solitude and prayers but what made her doubt her path in the church were the people who resided with her and who were suppose to guide her in this particular convent. It seems like with all institutions that involve the human ego, there will be people who rule not with kindness and understanding but with an iron fist with the illusion that they are the ultimate authority, even if it is not true and that is why Catherine leaves.
The story was easy to read and follow and I learn a lot about a nuns life. The story was a tragedy, a spiritual journey and a declaration of a life for a woman who was looking for a connection to her father and God and took a road less traveled then most of us will ever think about taking and found what she was looking for when it came to the spiritual road but not in sisterhood part, but according to the story there were other alternative convents but Catherine was discourage from transferring.
I don't want the readers to feel that convent life would always be bad because there were descriptions of other convents that had happier outcomes and it seems like the church made it so that one person can't be in charge forever.
I want to thank St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for an advance copy of this story about a subject matter that most of us think about but will never experience.

After losing her father, Catherine begins a spiritual journey that leads her into the cloistered life of a Carmelite nun. Once inside, she found mediocrity, conformity and unquestioning obedience. I’m not sure what to say about this book. It was a bit slow moving and anticlimactic. I couldn’t figure out what the plot was. I would have been more foraging or understanding if this was a memoir, but for fiction, it was a bust. Overall, it just wasn’t for me.

2.75. Since I grew up Catholic and attended a convent secondary school, the title and description of this book were interesting to me. There was always such secrecy about what went on when the nuns exited the school to enter the secluded convent area. As the nuns disappeared behind the curtains separating the school from the nunnery , we students watched in curiousity and wonder at what really went on in the convent. This book presented an inside look at what exactly went on in a cloistered Carmelite area which the author joined after a personal life tragedy. Such drama. It was difficult for me to imagine someone making a decision as radical as did the author - firstly, to become a Roman Catholic, and secondly, to join a silent cloistered community like the Carmelites. I was fascinated not only by the religious intensity and by the amount of physical labor demanded by members of the community. That alone would have disqualified me. I was not surprised at the ugly group dynamics and petty annoyances that emerged in the community of women. Leadership issues were paramount; different leadership styles and power dynamics were clearly present. I found the book a bit of a slog,but persevered to learn what the author did at the book's end. Recommend the book to anyone who would like to find out.

I want to preface this review with saying that I am not religious, nor am I really qualified to “review” other people’s life stories. So here goes nothing.

The first part reads like a meditation. It’s calming and serene, and is beautifully written. You gradually start to see things getting worse and worse. The order feels like a cult. And for a person who is not part of that cult some of the stuff that goes on in this book seems improbable, but then again the reader has the benefit of a bird’s eye view, and the book also does not take 12 years to read (this is how long the author was part of the Carmelite order) so the reader also does not experience any of those parts where nothing much happens. <spoiler> The episode that was most distressing to me was the instance where one of the sisters was having a seizure and no one apart from one considered helping her in any way. They justified it to themselves using the tenets of their order, but that really drove home how far they have drifted from anything resembling compassion. </spoiler>

One gripe I had with the book that others mentioned too was the hidden nonlinearity of the story. The overall arc is mostly linear, but some of the chapters talk about a specific topic that might develop over years, and therefore the reader gets to find out about something early on that wasn’t really an issue until much later (chapter about cats, for example). So there is a certain amount of jumping around without clear indication on what year of the story we are in.

Thanks to NetGalley and St Martin’s press for this ARC.

“Cloistered” is a memoir by Catherine Coldstream. This is a difficult book for me to review on a number of levels. First, I’ve read a number of memoirs about nuns, though most entered pre-Vatican II. Some of those nuns suffered the same way that Ms. Coldstream did, mentally at least, though in the end they, like Ms. Coldstream, left their houses for a variety of reasons. Second, this book while told in linear fashion, seemed to have holes in the story. While this is fact and Ms. Coldstream isn’t an all-knowing all-seeing narrator (as in a fiction book), I found it frustrating that things happened “because” and Ms. Coldstream didn’t seem to question it. Maybe that’s the sign of a good obedient nun, but it really bothered me and made me wonder why Ms. Coldstream didn’t put in a transfer to another Carmelite house since it bothered her that things changed to appease one person. This book has a lot of mental abuse in it - and I’m not questioning that abuse, but I seriously wonder why no one spoke up for Ms. Coldstream or even snuck a letter off to the local bishop in protest. In other words, a lot of things really bothered me about this book - not the reporting, but the actions of those Ms. Coldstream professed to care for, love, and have reverence for, too. I think that if one is curious about life in a convent - this book may be extremely eye opening for you - in some ways positive, in some negative. I know that everyone’s journey through life differs and I’m glad that Ms. Coldstream has found peace with that time and that she feels strong enough, now, to write about her experience.

I tried three times to submit a carefully considered review to Goodreads, and the app kicked me out without saving my work every time. So here goes:

CLOISTERED grabbed my attention because I've long had a fascination with the lives of nuns and monks. Catherine Coldstream enters a Carmelite convent as a convert in the wake of her father's death and her family's dissolution, and she doesn't shy away from examining her own motives in seeking a religious life, or in deciding to leave it. However, the narrative occasionally bogs down in somewhat repetitive, overly detailed examinations of every emotional nuance in a given situation. Coldstream also seems to be striving for an elevated literary tone that doesn't always serve the story.

That said, Coldstream is very effective in conveying what so many of us, even those of us who aren't a bit spiritual, find compelling about the cloistered religious life: the intensity, the clarity of purpose, the meaning to be found in turning one's life over to a higher calling.

I finished this book with mixed emotions: slight disappointment with the pace and style, but also gratitude for an honest, interesting, and self-searching look into a hidden way of life. Many many memoirists can't seem to see into their own motivations, and their memoirs are shallow and self-serving as a result. Coldstream avoids this pitfall. I look forward to more of her work.

This is a memoir about a women’s journey into faith, and then out of it. She joins a monastery and shared her experiences with it, and we also follow along in her choice to leave the monastery.
I was interested in this book to learn more about monasteries, and I am glad I was able to read it. I did find some part uninteresting and seemed to skim them.

This was an eye-opener on a subject I knew nothing about, except from what I learned in The Sound of Music! The very basics of being a nun or a monk involve so much self-sacrifice and isolation that are just not natural human behaviors. Catherine felt very honest as she explained her reasons for what appealed to her and why she became a nun, but why she stayed as long as she did baffles me. It made me wonder how many monasteries are like hers.

I was excited to get a look into a life that we often don’t get a privilege to get a peek into but this book only slightly covered those parts. It was a journey of self finding while joining and then finding a way back into a secular setting.
It was heavy read at times and didn’t always keep my interest.

I received a free copy of, Cloistered by Catherine Coldstream, from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Catherine was a cloistered nun at Akenside Priory in Northumberland. I found this book to be a little disturbing at times. An interesting tale of one women's journey as a cloistered nun.

I have received this ARC from NetGalley and the publisher. So thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this opportunity!

This was quite different from what I usually read but i was really intrigued when I saw the cover. And i am so glad that I picked this book up.
I have learned so much from this, I couldn’t help but shed a tear at certain parts because my heart broke and was shattered.

It was an eye opening view of a life most of the world knows nothing about. An idealist young women joins a cloistered group and comes face to face with the twisted version of the original ideals. Thanks for the chance to peek into this world - through one person's eyes.

I really liked this memoir. I've always been fascinated with cloistered nuns, mostly because I can't understand that type of commitment.

I really respect the author's courage to talk about something that has always been behind closed doors. Yes, it was only her side of the story but I felt that it was very informative and insightful.