I’m trying to remember the name of a sweetly simple novel, not very long and probably published in the 1960s, about a young motherless girl whose father brings her to a convent so the nuns can raise her while he–works? Travels? I can’t recall. I believe it was written in first person, and the girl lives a fairly idyllic existence with the nuns, who treat her with every kindness until her father returns. She doesn’t always understand their little jokes, such as one involving “elbow grease” that I never forgot. The title and author, however, are another story.
Stump the Bookseller
New format, same book stumper solving.
What comes to mind is Daddy Longlegs by Jean Webster and I’ll leave it as a possibility though it must be wrong: the girl might have just been in a boarding school, not a convent; and the man is not her father but eventually her husband.
Possibly: An Angel Grows Up, by Tere Rios.
Does the girl have a sexual experience with one of the other girls? Then she is accused of witching the other girl?
I’m thinking of a book I loved as a kid, Mary Kate by Rita Shields. Published in 1963, set at the beginning of WWII, a chapter book but only 120 pages. Mary Kate is an orphan who’s been living with the nuns all her life, but she befriends a little boy who was left there by his military father after his mother’s death, and is eventually adopted by the father and his new wife.
I just read this! A very nice story. No elbow grease, though.
I remember this one. I read it over and over.