** spoiler alert ** I have only heard from other readers that Willa Cather is an amazing author, a woman who truly understands America's people, one who can capture the beauty of its landscapes with the vivid detail her silky prose paints. I have heard her praised as a brilliant champion of the fiction, especially of the descriptive passage.
So I was just a smidge sad to find in this book a painful amount of dry (we're talking drier than the deserts the plot flounders in), lifeless writing focusing on, quite literally, the plodding life and eventually death of an archbishop I never managed to like or even passionately hate at all.

Youch, the meanest things I've ever written about a book. But really, I was forced to read it, and I hated every minute.