Born in Sweetwater, West Virginia, with a mop of flaming red hair and a map of the world rendered in port-wine stains on every surface of her body, Garnet Ferrari is used to being an outcast. With her sharp tongue, she has always known how to defend herself against bullies and aggressors but finds she is less adept at fending off the pilgrims who have set up a veritable tent city outside her hilltop home, convinced she is Saint Garnet, healer of skin ailments and maker of miracles.
Her grandmother, the indelible Nonna Diamante, believes Garnet's mystical gift can be traced back to the family's origins in the Nebrodi Mountains of Sicily, and now the Vatican has sent an emissary to Sweetwater to investigate. Garnet, wanting nothing more than to debunk this "gift" and send these desperate souls packing, reaches back into her family's tangled past and unspools for the church a tale of love triangles on the shores of the Messina Strait; a sad, beautiful maiden's gilded-cage childhood in blueblood Virginia; and the angelic, doomed boy Garnet could not protect.
Saint or not, Garnet learns that the line between reality and myth is always blurred and that the aspects of ourselves we are most ashamed of can prove to be the source of our greatest strength, and even our salvation.
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“Patron Saint of Ugly
is as steeped in magic as one of Nonna’s spells—it will make you laugh, fill
you with wonder, and break your heart all at once. Garnet, the unwilling saint
of ugly, performs miracles among a delightful cast of Italian witches, Southern
families, and the deformed and injured who come in search of healing. But
surviving her distressed family, and repairing her own broken soul, may be the
biggest miracle of all. Richly conceived and energetic, this is a tale of love,
rejection, and the hazy lines between reality and myth.”
—
Zoë Ferraris, author of Finding Nouf