CALIFORNIA MEDIEVAL is an intriguing hybrid memoir, interspersed with poetry, song, and lyrical vignettes. It explores the world of a Franciscan convent during the heyday of the 1960s in San Francisco at the birth of the flower-power era, as seen through the eyes of a novitiate nun, newly arrived in the Bay Area from a rural community in southwestern Washington State. This book is a stylistically and structurally adventurous narrative that forms a literary intersection of music, spirituality, nature, sociology, and sexuality. Written in an engaging, wryly humorous voice, Dugaw's unique story of her early adulthood at a convent is sure to draw readers who are curious about her cloistered life at a time in our country's history that was in the midst of its own spiritual and social awakening.