This was a very good story. I saw it was available at the NYPL and borrowed it without really looking at what it was about. Thich Nhat Hanh's books are usually short, easy to digest, and leave me feeling a bit more optimistic about life. I was looking for something like that, but this is a much more powerful story and wound up being very inspirational.

Once I was a few chapters in, I thought this was a fictional story that Thich Nhat Hanh had come up with, and I was surprised because that's not his usual style or method for teaching. Instead, "The Novice" is apparently his retelling of a traditional Vietnamese story about a Buddhist novice and the acknowledgment of her status as a bodhisattva after she passed away. The story is very engaging and well worth the time invested in reading it.