Thresholds of Grace: Abigail Favale’s Our Lady of the Sign

Thresholds of Grace: Abigail Favale’s Our Lady of the Sign

By Franci Revel Eckensberger, Lead Editor

***Spoiler Alert!***
This review discusses major thematic and plot developments in Our Lady of the Sign.

In the quiet days preceding Christmas, a woman returns to her childhood home in Idaho that has been turned into a vacation rental. She finds herself standing at a threshold where her memories, desires, and decisions both past and present dangerously entwine. The result is a sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes mind-bending, always compelling drama by Abigail Favale, Notre Dame professor and author of Into the Deep and The Genesis of Gender. 

Simone Stark, the protagonist of Our Lady of the Sign, has returned to the home she shared with her mother during the most formative years of her adolescence on an unnameable impulse. An accomplished and intelligent academic, Simone is a woman who has built a life on the premise that total autonomy is the highest good, yet her own agency has seemingly been overtaken by this impulse. She is alone, almost a foreigner in her own snow-blanketed quasi-hometown, carrying the weight of a decision that she has been told is simple, yet behaves like something alive, with its own momentum and terrible gravity. 

The book’s central drama surrounds Simone’s unplanned pregnancy—a child from a relationship that seems “good enough,” but perhaps not the pinnacle of her romantic life. Though not explicitly established from the story’s onset, the option to abort her baby has clearly taken on a life of its own from the first pages, as we eventually come to recognize it as the catalyst for her decision to return to Idaho and the decisions she faces thereafter. We see the very ability to make this choice sort of start to act outside of Simone’s will, even as she—and the world—understand it as her will. This choice, presented as an ultimate freedom by Simone’s doctor, loved ones, and the culture she inhabits, is thrown into disorder by her experience in the Idaho house. A deeply moral book that refuses moralizing or judgment, Our Lady of the Sign shows us a woman in the act of choosing, who discovers that the choices she thought were hers alone are entangled with forces she cannot name, control, or sometimes trust. As the house begins to breathe, animated by her past, her anxieties, and an unnamed presence, Simone’s perception of her agency, sharpened by her mother all her life, begins to dissolve and transform.

When Simone crosses the threshold into the Idaho house—this novel is full of doors both metaphorical and physical that arrange and filter how she encounters her memories, her choices, her wishes, her beliefs—she finds more than painful memories waiting. The presence there shifts between beauty and terror, invitation and threat. Is it her own mind fracturing under pressure, or is it something real, something outside herself? Is the presence formed from guilt, sadness, love, or evil? The novel’s answers are winding and complicated, reminding us that the spiritual realm is not always as it seems, that our choices have consequences outside the bounds of ourselves, and that we are never as alone (or as autonomous) as we may think or feel. 

During Simone’s return to Idaho, her prior coordinates of meaning and discernment seem to be lost, cracking at the seams as she navigates the rooms of the old house. Favale leans into the surrealism with remarkable confidence. Time, rooms, and furniture all fold in on themselves, with Simone stuck in the creases between past and present, natural and supernatural. These elements deepen the novel’s psychological realism, giving an external shape to the interior fragmentation of a woman at quiet war with her choices and the forces that shape them. 

As Simone draws closer to Christmas, the time ticking on the abortion pill, the presence in the house becomes more and more complex and confrontational while the novel becomes bracingly Catholic in its vision, even as Simone remains agnostic. Favale deftly handles subject matter that could be easy to moralize with heavy hands. Instead, the story’s moral weight comes from the heft of the subject itself—the gravity of what is at stake is enough and does not need to be dressed up in argument or preachiness. The Church is present in the novel, and the ancient Marian icon from which it draws its title plays a key

role. But when Simone seeks help, the priest is actually too busy. There is no clergy member or book or prayer around to “save” her. The novel emphasizes, again and again, the personal spiritual experience. It insists that this is Simone’s encounter and reckoning. It also understands the manifestation of evil as a whispering thing, able to convince one of her own loneliness and isolation even as she carries the product of relational love in her womb. As the glistening presence in the house morphs repeatedly, it seeks to claim Simone. Does it seek her as its victim? Or does it seek her surrender to His grace? Encountering the presence, Simone and the reader are both suspended in a state of intrigue, half-trust, and confusion. The encounter inspires a kind of examen that runs the course of the story: Whose voice am I listening to? Whose voice dominated my past? Whose will am I following? Who is asking me to surrender my autonomy and why? 

Favale’s rendering of the supernatural pulls its weight—the descriptions of Simone’s experiences in the house and the house as a character itself are often intoxicating, yet never abandon their moral and narrative bearing on the story. Her writing is lyrical and ignites both the heart and intellect, but the book also manages to be a page-turner with elements of a thriller and hints of romance. It’s not quite like anything I’ve ever read. Calling it an allegory comes close, yet the term fails to capture the novel’s deep intimacy with its heroine’s psyche and heart. Simone’s story is ultimately one of the heroic act of love that is saying yes to life, to mystery, to the vulnerability of being acted upon by grace rather than by forces that seek our destruction and the destruction of life at large. 

Our Lady of the Sign was a highly emotional read for me, and is sure to be for many. Favale beautifully displays the patient, quiet nature of grace, the way conversion is less about perfect certainty than about the willingness to stop running from God, and the confusion and pain wrought by choices made in a secular moral vacuum. The latter is handled with particular empathy and finesse. The novel asks the same questions that many women are asking themselves today about autonomy, supposed burdens, freedom, their plans, and the pasts that haunt them. It reveals one woman’s capacity to trust in what waits beyond the threshold of saying her own unique yes to faith in life. As I write this, my own newborn daughter is asleep beside me, mewing like a kitten. She is soft, beautiful, needy, and vulnerable, my clear yes after a lifetime filled with saying no, and a constant reminder that I do not belong to myself alone—and thank God for that. 

Thinking back on this novel, I’m reminded of the power of allowing oneself to be acted upon by love. Our Lady of the Sign invites the reader, like Simone, to cross a threshold away from the illusion of self-sovereignty and toward the awesome vulnerability of trust in what waits on the other side. There is so much more to say about this novel and its very unique accomplishments. I highly recommend you pick up a copy to see for yourself.

Our Lady of the Sign is available now from Ignatius Press here, alongside The Genesis of Gender and Into the Deep.

Don’t miss Abigail Favale’s upcoming appearance on A Resounding Yes! this February! Find us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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Lead Editor Franci Revel Eckensberger holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Cornell University. With years of experience as a copyeditor for academics, fellow writers, and various small businesses, she takes pride in maintaining clarity, consistency, and beauty in each client’s voice. 

Franci finds grace and insight in the Catholic Church’s rich relationship to language and invites that relationship to influence both her literary and editorial work. Saint Cecilia and Catherine of Siena continue to play a vital role in her journey to the faith as an artist. She lives in coastal Delaware with her husband.