Quick Take
- Narration: Devon O’day brings warmth and clarity to Sister Jean’s story, capturing the gentle authority of a woman who has spent a century earning the right to give advice.
- Themes: Faith as daily practice, longevity and adaptability, service as vocation
- Mood: Gentle and energizing, like a very good conversation with someone who has seen everything and remains genuinely optimistic
- Verdict: More substantial than its motivational packaging suggests, a memoir and philosophy text in equal parts, anchored by a life that actually earned the lessons it’s passing on.
I picked up Wake Up With Purpose! expecting something in the inspirational memoir category that I’d set aside after an hour. Sister Jean had become famous in 2018 when Loyola Chicago’s basketball team made it to the Final Four and the ninety-eight-year-old team chaplain became the tournament’s unlikely icon. It seemed like the kind of story that would produce a pleasant but thin book. I was wrong about that. At six hours and eleven minutes, narrated by Devon O’day with material co-written with Seth Davis, this is a fuller and stranger thing than the sports story packaging implies.
Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt was born in 1919, taught during World War II, served on a Chicago college campus through the sixties, and was still making herself available to students for daily office-door conversations when this book was written. She also happened to know basketball well enough to give real tactical input to coaches who eventually started listening to her. But the book is careful not to let the basketball story swallow everything else, and that restraint is what makes it work.
A Life Long Enough to Span Everything
The extraordinary thing about Sister Jean as a memoirist is that her span of experience makes almost any comparison to contemporary life feel inadequate. She taught in Catholic schools during the Second World War. She navigated the enormous institutional changes to religious life brought by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. She watched the Loyola campus transform across multiple generations of students. The book’s opening declaration, that she has seen so many changes in the last hundred and two years but the important things remain the same, is the kind of line that reads as cliche until you consider that the speaker actually lived those hundred and two years and arrived at that conclusion from the other side of genuine historical upheaval.
Devon O’day’s narration understands this. The warmth in the delivery is not generic warmth applied to inspirational content; it carries the specific register of someone telling a very old woman’s story with the respect that story has earned. O’day reads the humor well, which matters, because Sister Jean is genuinely funny. The one reviewer who quotes her line about taking ninety-eight years to become an overnight sensation is right to single it out. The comedic timing in those moments is not accidental.
What the Basketball Story Is Really About
The 2018 March Madness run is in the book, but it functions less as the main event and more as proof of a thesis Sister Jean has been working toward her whole life: that showing up consistently for other people produces relationships of unexpected depth, and those relationships eventually change the room you’re in. She didn’t become the Loyola Ramblers’ chaplain because she wanted television exposure. She became useful to the program by learning it carefully over years, offering the kind of thoughtful engagement that most casual observers never bother with.
Seth Davis, the basketball writer who co-authored the book, brings structural clarity to what could have been a diffuse collection of anecdotes. The memoir reads chronologically but the philosophy text runs alongside it, with chapters that use her life experience as the evidence base for principles about adaptability, service, and what she calls setting aside quiet time at the start of each day. The combination works because the principles are not imposed on the life; they emerge from it.
The Spiritual Core, Handled Without Salesmanship
This is, inescapably, a book about faith. Sister Jean is a Religious Sister of Charity, and her Catholicism is not incidental to the memoir; it’s the framework through which she has organized a hundred years of experience. One of the things I found most striking is that the book makes no argument for Catholicism specifically and no effort to convert the reader. The faith is simply there, the way a landscape feature is simply there, shaping everything without needing to be debated. Listeners of any belief system can engage with the material because the faith is presented as practice and relationship rather than doctrine.
With 906 ratings and a 4.7 average, this has found a wide audience that clearly extends beyond Loyola athletics fans. Reviewers mention feeling genuinely inspired by someone whose inspiration is rooted in something real rather than assembled from motivational tropes. That’s a meaningful distinction. Sister Jean is not performing resilience; she just kept showing up for a hundred years and lived long enough to describe what that looked like from the inside.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
Recommended for anyone looking for a memoir that earns its philosophical weight rather than borrowing it. Particularly rewarding for listeners who have tired of motivational content that floats free of actual experience. Listeners expecting a basketball book will find more memoir and philosophy than sport here, which may disappoint some. Those interested in women religious, mid-century American Catholic life, or simply one extraordinary person’s account of a very long life in service should move this to the top of the queue.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much of the audiobook is focused on the 2018 NCAA tournament versus Sister Jean’s broader life?
The tournament is present but not dominant. It functions more as a set piece within a much larger memoir spanning over a century of experience. Listeners expecting a sports audiobook may be surprised by how much ground the book covers beyond basketball.
Is this book accessible to listeners who aren’t Catholic or aren’t religious at all?
Yes. The faith is central to Sister Jean’s life but the book presents it as lived practice rather than theological argument. Reviewers from various backgrounds have found it accessible and relevant without religious commitment.
Does Devon O’day’s narration capture Sister Jean’s distinct personality effectively?
Very well. O’day conveys both the warmth and the dry humor that come through in the memoir, and handles the transitions between the autobiographical and philosophical sections smoothly.
Is this memoir primarily biographical or primarily motivational in structure?
Both elements are genuinely present. Seth Davis’s co-authorship brings structural clarity that balances the life narrative with philosophical reflection. It reads as both a memoir and a loose set of principles, with the life doing the work of proving the principles.
