As I was reading Matrix, I kept thinking, "Why has Marie never once changed?" The book follows so tightly over her shoulder from age 17 until her death in her 70s, and her temperament never changes. She is always a solemn, steadfast giantess of a woman who never errs in her judgement, always invokes fear and respect, never speaks out of turn. The world and its seasons spin around her, but she remains firm and still.

Then, near the end of her life, the narrator reflects that Marie has changed her opinion of the abbey where she lives in one way: she has grown to love it. It is not a prison; it is her fortress filled with love. This change happens from one page to the next and I didn't catch a sense of it when I was reading—the narrator literally laid it out in black and white for me.

Although the line craft was beautiful, the imagery was powerful, and a story of the magician's helper being stabbed in a box came full circle in an ingenious way, the "camera" held so close to Marie that I hardly saw anything around her and I wish Groff had expanded and given a bit of breathing room to the entire story. I think the author had a vision of Marie the heretical nun who crafted a home for herself and that was the extent of the idea. At the end, when the new abbess goes into Marie's study and remembers her as a younger abbess is one of the best scenes in the entire book because finally the camera zooms out a bit to show the entire room. If only the whole story had been written from the perspective of one of the other women—now that would have been interesting.

This book works much better in print than audio, I tried both.