In the early 1970s an angelic teenage girl named Bella dies mysteriously at St. X. School for Girls. She had been an initiate to “the Sisterhood,” a small group of students who gathered in one another’s dorm rooms after hours where they smoked cigarettes, applied make-up, did each other’s hair, and read fashion magazines and stolen pornographic magazines. Harmless stuff, until the night of Bella’s death.

Twenty-five years later one of the former members of the Sisterhood, Sister Angela, now an Ottawa nun, receives by mail a silver candlestick, the instrument of Bella’s death. “Do you know who has come for you?” she asks herself in a conscious parody of the question asked of novitiates.

Readers expecting a potboiler or a standard sleuth story will probably be disappointed with The Divine Economy of Salvation, Toronto poet Priscilla Uppal’s first novel. Uppal reaches for something more literary than the solving of a mystery, as she explores a character’s reconciliation with the past and the choices that both linger and shape one’s life. The novel’s paired time frames (showing Angela as a teenager and as a nun) offer multiple perspectives on this fascinating character. As the story of Angela’s teenage years unfolds, readers come to see her joining the Order less as an act of faith than one of desperation.

Uppal writes in a clean, clear voice, and can be forgiven for occasional passages of overly poetic diction – the novel is, after all, told in the voice of a teenage girl, given to hyperbole and the ecstasies and agonies of that age. She writes convincingly of women’s closed worlds (the school scenes and Sister Angela’s current cloistered life), family disintegration, and relationships between the sexes. Some readers may find Uppal’s resistance to genre expectations frustrating – expectations she herself establishes with the mysterious candlestick – but The Divine Economy of Salvation will reward those attuned to its subtler pleasures.