These ten stories are irresistible because their author is both fearless and ambitious. She switches points of view effortlessly, brings us to far-flung regions of the world, and has an uncanny, authentic grasp of cultures. We travel from Varanasi to Tijuana, from Rome to Lhasa, to New Orleans, Valdez, Barcelona and the Isle of Skye. The characters are just as diverse: Maggie, who accidentally kills her one-year-old brother, travels to climb Mount Everest as an act of spiritual redemption. Chuy, a Mexican man who makes his living by carving and selling life-size Jesus statues at the Tijuana/US border, falls in love with another artisan he meets at the border market; a Norwegian preacher relocates to Varanasi India and fruitlessly tries to convert Hindus and Muslims to Christianity; and in Rome, adolescent Vittoria falls in love with a priest and masquerades as a boy in order to serve mass. And in the title story of the collection, two women in New Orleans masquerade as nuns in order to fund an orphanage. These fictions, many of which occur thousands of miles and centuries apart, representing wildly different cultures and situations, are unified in their portrayal of ordinary citizens of the world struggling against extraordinary events. And they are written with a remarkable mixture of pathos and humor.