historical fiction

The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín

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There are some authors whose every book is a must-read for me. Tóibín is one, ever since I picked up a battered copy of The Heather Blazing at a used book and tool sale in a market town in England twenty years ago. I persuaded my book club to read it as well and they’ve gone on to enjoy other novels by him. You’ll find several of his books in my blog: Brooklyn, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, The Empty Family, Nora Webster, and The Magician.

Not having been raised Catholic and a longtime feminist, I’ve given little thought to the culture that has built up around Mary, aside from discarding the stereotype of her as docile and obedient that many people hold up as the ideal toward which all women should strive. As a mother, I could feel her horror and grief at the death of her son, but that made me dislike even more the priestly glorification of human sacrifice. Well, I guess they would say half-human.

However, this first-person narrative captured me immediately, giving me a new and completely plausible image of an historical Mary. Here, she is older and alone, living in Ephesus, a city known for its Temple of Artemis, located in what is now Turkey, thus far enough away from Rome to offer safe haven from her Roman pursuers. There, she is visited by two of her son’s disciples who watch and support her even as they question her repeatedly about her son’s life to bolster their own narratives. She says:

They think that I do not know the elaborate nature of their desires. But nothing escapes me now except sleep . . . They are too locked into their vast and insatiable needs and too dulled by the remnants of a terror we all felt then to have noticed that I remember everything. Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.

She considers those who followed her son a “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” and judges herself with the same brutal clarity. In this slim novella, she tells us her story, the one she holds in every part of her body.

And it is an utterly credible story. If there truly was an historical Jesus—his name is never mentioned in this book—then this portrait of a happy, playful child grown into a cold and distant man is one I can believe. It is the story of too many men, and a few women, who have embraced the portrait of themselves they see in others’ eyes and the power that comes with it.

It is not the story that has come down to us; that’s the one crafted by his followers, the one she disputes. It is still an enthralling one. A mother, telling us about her son—her son. She discounts the stories she hears about his so-called miracles as exaggerations by the crowd that follows him. Even her glancing acquaintance with the results, such as meeting the undead Lazarus, are ambiguous.

Tóibín has crafted a tender and agonizing book that has changed my view of Mary and her son.

What novel of Colm Tóibín’s have you read? What did you think about it?

Haven, by Emma Donoghue

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My horror at the devastation wrought by evangelical “Christians” (who eschew the basic tenets of Christianity) in the U.S. made this novel tough going for me. I couldn’t get past my outrage that anyone would submit themselves to torture and starvation in the name of religion when salvation—an earthly one to be sure—was so easily available.

Donoghue, author of Room, has constructed another story where people are confined in a tiny location, dependent on the whims of an all-powerful tyrant. In 600 A.D. Cluain Mhic Nóis, an Irish monastery, hosts a visiting holy man, perhaps the holiest man on earth: Artt, legendary for having read every book in existence and surviving the plague with the loss only of a finger.

While there, Artt has a dream—surely a holy vision!—that he should found a new monastery on a remote island off the Irish coast, far from the earthly temptations that have, in his view, corrupted Cluain Mhic Nóis. The dream/vision/mandate from God further commands that he take two of the monks: Cormac, an older man who came late to religion and is fond of telling stories, and young, impressionable Trian, who was given to the monastery at 13.

They fetch up on a stony isle that it is hard to imagine anyone could survive a week on, though the author’s note assures us that it is indeed the site of a medieval monastery. The fascination for me was in the various ways they—mostly Cormac to be honest—find to survive in this hostile environment. Trian, too, captures the heart with their sweetness and love for everything—birds, fellows, mussels, God. Artt is just, in my opinion, a self-righteous, narcissistic blowhard, convinced that he alone is the conduit of God’s word.

Well, obviously I’m the wrong audience for this book. I could hardly bear continuing to read of their hardships, knowing that civilisation—with, sure, its evils, but also actual sustenance and shelter—is only a short boat ride away. The writing is gorgeous but the story infuriating.

I have my moments of thinking like Artt that the world is incurably decadent, and wanting to preserve some small piece of what life could really be like. But this is not the way. And I’m far too practical to take my minions, even if I could bear to have minions, away from necessities like food, water and shelter to create religious monuments. Nor could I ever sacrifice others to my vision of my own greatness.

So, while I admire the prose, the story left me cold. No, not cold, but a turbulent mix of emotions: frustration, anger, sadness, a hint of longing. The book challenged me to think outside my own box, a challenge I guess I failed. Stil, I’m left thinking of John Lennon’s Imagine: no religions, nothing to die for.

Have you read a novel that challenged you?

Pattern of Lies, by Charles Todd

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Bess Crawford, a nursing sister on the frontlines in France near the end of the Great War, returns on leave to England to find a different kind of war being waged. Stuck in Canterbury when the London train is cancelled and all the hotels full, she runs into a former patient, Maj. Mark Ashton, who invites her to stay with him and his parents at their home in nearby Cranbourne.

What she finds is that the tiny village has turned against the Ashtons, particularly John’s father Philip. The Ashton Powder Mill, once the largest employer around and a place where workers were treated particularly well, had blown up two years previously, an explosion followed by a devastating fire, killing over a hundred men.

The Army investigated, fearing sabotage, but declared it an unfortunate accident. Due to the war, the need for gunpowder was overwhelming, and the mill had been commandeered by the Army. Despite Philip’s warnings, the new masters had the mill working flat out to meet the demand, with extra shifts and new workers brought in.

Now the villagers have become convinced that Philip Ashton is responsible for the disaster. Bess is shocked by the retaliatory actions they have taken: tearing down walls, releasing animals, spitting at anyone associated with the Ashtons, even setting fire to their house.

Given the suddenness of the accusation and its wide spread, Bess comes to believe that someone is behind the rumors, someone angry with Philip Ashton or the Ashton family. Unfortunately, the only witness to the fire is a local man now serving at the front in France who refuses to request leave to come back and make a statement.

There is almost nothing more terrifying to me than this kind of hysteria. We see it today with the firehose of misinformation. We have seen it before: Lillian Hellman described it chillingly in The Children’s Hour and Arthur Miller in The Crucible. It is almost impossible to defend oneself as rumors spread.

This mystery, seventh in the Bess Crawford series, though the first one I’ve read, is absorbing. There are plenty of twists and turns, and plenty of clues. Best of all, we get Bess’s impressions of England and France during wartime. Her duties vary from working at the front itself, escorting patients to hospital in the backlines in an ambulance under fire, and caring for patients as they are shipped back to England.

The latter gives her plenty of opportunity to visit the Ashtons, as she must pass through Canterbury, and pursue her own investigation while offering support to the family. The other characters are memorable due to the nuance with which they are rendered. I especially liked that the authors (Charles Todd is the pseudonym for mother and son Caroline and Charles Todd) avoids the standard romantic subplot.

The time period increased my enjoyment of this book. I’ve long been fascinated by the Great War, aka WWI, which changed everything for the Western world. Empires ended, colonies gained freedom, global power shifted, and the irresponsible slaughter not only decimated populations and economies but destroyed the ideal that it was glorious to die for your country. As Wilfred Owen put it: If you could have experienced what he did in the trenches

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Do you read historical fiction? Do you have a favorite time period?

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

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The story opens with the infamous Nellie Coker, owner of a string of nightclubs in 1926 London, being released from Holloway Prison at dawn. Many of the toffs and high-ranking politicians who revel at her clubs and who conspired with her in evading police scrutiny are present, a bit bedraggled by their long night dancing and drinking, to celebrate Nellie’s release, along with “the usual riffraff and rubberneckers.”

Nellie immediately has to buckle down and defend her empire from several threats.

Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, on loan to Bow Street to “root out corruption,” is one of those threats, though he is hampered by the distrust of his new colleagues, the distraction of a string of drownings of young girls, and his own ineffectual nature. He is unhappily married to a mentally ill woman; he’s not really sure why he married her except that he prevented her from jumping off a bridge.

With characteristic humor, Atkinson vividly depicts the London club scene of the time. The aftermath of the Great War is everywhere in this story, from wartime reminiscences of the doorman to the difference between men who had gone to war and those who had not. Even the reckless abandon of 1920s London is blamed on a reaction to the war.

The criminal elements are mostly played for laughs. This bumbling cast of villains reinforces Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. Writers don’t come off much better. Frobisher’s articles requested by John Bull are never published because they are not sensational enough. Ramsey Coker wants to be a best-selling author, but is too lazy to actually write.

Atkinson has done her research on this period. However, this novel illustrates the danger of too much research. I found it an unsatisfying story of uninteresting characters.

It also illustrates the danger of using real people and their lives for a story. Real people the author only knows from reading about them don’t necessarily make for interesting characters. There’s too little detail, nothing that makes them stand out. Frobisher, “influenced” by real-life Superintendent Robert Fabian and Nellie Coker, based on the real “queen of Soho’s clubland” Kate Meyrick, never quite come to life in this story.

Nellie’s obnoxious brood seem like empty caricatures put in place for plot purposes. The two 14-year-old girls who run away to London are stock characters. There’s a prostitute with a heart of gold, two policemen on the take, a strict battleax running a hotel for women, and so on.

Only the third protagonist, fictional Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian who has come to London in search of the two lost girls, steps off the page, displaying real emotion and unexpected competencies. A nurse during the war, she is more than equal to London’s recklessness.

The other danger of using real lives is that they rarely fit into the kind of narrative arc readers expect. Here, plot threads are abandoned without being resolved; story questions are not answered; important events are random happenings rather than growing organically out of the characters and the plot. True, a couple of threads and questions are dispatched, but too much is left unresolved for there to be a satisfactory ending.

I had to wonder why I should care about these characters and their lives when the author seemed to care so little that she would just abruptly abandon them.

Just like real life, you might say. True. And it is somewhat interesting as an experiment. Atkinson is not alone among authors questioning whether standard story structures adequately represent our lives in this world. I appreciate her willingness to tinker with the balance between reality and story. Still, it was too insubstantial a story to satisfy me.

Have you read an historical novel that includes real people as characters? What did you think of it?

Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck

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This absorbing historical novel follows two real women who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake both have a history with France. Violette was born there of a French mother and English father and grew up in England to become a strong-willed Cockney. Virginia is an American who, like Violette, falls in love with and marries a Frenchman.

From the start, we are caught up in the rumors of war, brought to life through the eyes of these two women. With the stunning invasion of France, a pregnant Violette in London immediately starts campaigning to do some kind of war work, despite her father’s discouragement, a campaign that takes fire when her husband in killed in North Africa. Meanwhile, Virginia elects to remain in France with her beloved husband, invalided out early in the war.

Alternate chapters follow the two women as they find their way forward, Violette doing various kinds of war work before joining the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret UK intelligence agency, in the hopes of being sent to France, Virginia and her husband sheltering and helping downed pilots and escaped POWs.

Beautifully written, full of stunning scenes that we discover in the historical note at the end actually happened, this is one of those books that you simply cannot stop reading. It’s a fantastic addition to our understanding of what was happening beyond the battlefields during this showdown with fascism.

You might think that I would have had enough of women Resistance fighters after reading nonfiction books about Virginia Hall, one of the first British spies in France where she organised Resistance units and provided critical intelligence to the Allies, and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who also ran a Resistance operation in France, supplying critical information to MI6, the UK’s Special Intelligence Service. I thought so too until I read reviews of this book by Robuck, whom I know slightly.

Why read yet another book about World War II? One: because this is a story of real people based on Roebuck’s extensive research. Two: because many people don’t realise the role that women played in the war effort, particularly in the Resistance. Three: because it is important to remember the actual horrors of Hitler’s fascist state and the weakness of those who supported and contributed to it. Remembering the heart-breaking realities of fascism is especially critical today when the radical right, funded by amoral one-percenters, are waving swastikas and trying to persuade people in this country to do away with democracy and embrace fascism in order to fulfill their white supremacist dreams and fantasies of a nation with no freedom of religion.

In her Author’s Note, Robuck tells us how Virginia and Violette’s stories came together, “showing the different ways that women, in particular, are called to serve, how each of us has a vocation, and we cannot have peace until we become who we are meant to be. Also, ultimately, they show us that none of us can operate alone. We are all called into a community of people working together for good.”

Virginia and Violette—their courage and integrity—are an inspiration for us all.

Have you read a history—fictionalised or nonfiction—that has inspired you?

The Last Bookshop in London, by Madeline Martin

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When Grace Bennett lost her mother, she lost almost everything. Her sole relative, an uncle, not only takes over her house but also dismisses her from her job at his store without a reference. She and her more adventurous friend Viv have always dreamed of going to London, so they set off, buoyed by the offer of lodgings with a friend of Grace’s mother.

It’s August, 1939.

Viv gets her dream job at Harrods, but timid Grace has no luck because she has no references. Finally, the fond, if bossy, Mrs. Weatherford bullies the owner of a struggling bookshop into hiring Grace for six months so she can get the necessary reference.

Primrose Hill is barely staying afloat because it is far away from Paternoster Row, home of most of London’s bookstores, and its owner Mr. Evans is not much of a businessman. Grace is nervous: she’s not a reader, so how can she recommend books to customers?

However, her retail experience helps her make the shop more organized and attractive, and she finds the kindness lurking under Mr. Evans’s gruff exterior. She also enjoys the customers, especially George whose encouragement finally gets her to start reading.

Then war comes, with blackout curtains and the Blitz. Amid loss and constant fear, Grace volunteers as an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden, coincidentally paired with the grumpiest of the store’s customers, sending her out on the dark nights during the worst of the bombing. She takes refuge in her new passion: reading. On the nights she’s not on duty, when she and Mrs. Weatherfield sleep in the subway tunnels, she’s persuaded to read aloud to help others pass the time and distract them from their fears.

This second in a string of bookshop books for me starts out as a light read, but quickly turns serious with the start of World War II. The story eloquently depicts the home front: the women and old men left behind, the first attempt to find your way home in the blackout, the fear at the sound of the doorbell because it could be someone delivering a telegram, the sounds and smells of sleeping in the tube station turned air raid shelter, the attempt to extinguish incendiaries, the shock—first physical and then emotional—of a bomb blast.

What I most admire in this story is the way Martin integrates the larger story of the war with Grace’s particular journey. The grim accuracy of life in London during the Blitz, and all the losses—loved ones, homes, security—keep this from being a frothy romance or coming-of-age story. The war is not just pasted on to add drama; it informs everything in Grace’s story, from large events to the smallest detail.

What novel have you read that incorporates events current to the story?

A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason

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Having found Mason’s novel The Winter Soldier a rich experience, I picked up this collection of short stories. I was surprised to find that I had already read one of them in The Atlantic and thought it brilliant.

“For the Union Dead” begins with the narrator being asked to sort through the belongings of his recently deceased uncle, a nan he didn’t know well. “He was a quiet figure, my father’s only brother, and overshadowed by my mother’s sprawling clan of six siblings.” The narrator does know that Teddy was peculiar: an unmarried man who wore suspenders, drank borscht every morning, and kept the tv tuned to pro wrestling. We learn more about Teddy’s background, his growing interest in Civil War reenactment, and the strange way he chose to participate in it. All add up to an unforgettable portrait of man and the weight of history.

The other stories are about equally peculiar people. Set in earlier ages, each delves into a person who is, well, different. From naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace collecting new species in the Malay Archipelago to a female aéronaute piloting a balloon into eternity, their voices invite us to share their experience as they launch themselves outside society’s straitjacket.

I particularly liked “The Line Agent Pascal” which begins “Every morning Hippolyte Pascal, agent of the Line at Urupá, woke to the sun and the sound of parrots, rose from his hammock, dressed, set a battered kettle on the fire, and crossed his tiny station to check the signal.”

Writers are often advised to leave out routine actions for fear of boring the reader. Yet this first sentence not only grounds the reader in time and place, but also conveys his solitude. It is a time when the telegraph was necessary to connect the town and the distant mines, when the technology was primitive enough to require signal boosters at intervals along the line. But it is his solitude that is the core of the story, the eternal balancing act between solitude and society.

The title story takes us into one of the farthest of society’s outliers: Arthur Bispo de Rosário who calls himself a sailor and “a collector of lives.” What today we would call an outsider artist, he speaks to us from the Brazilian psychiatric institution, his home for fifty years, where a doctor draws details of his life from him. Interspersed in the narrative are Arthur’s descriptions of his elaborate embroideries, part of his “divine mission.“ Mason draws on his own work as a psychiatrist to take us into the mind of this actual person, diagnosed with schizophrenia, whose name now adorns Rio de Janeiro’s Contemporary Art Museum.

The real question in these stories is: What does it feel like to be inside this person’s head? How do they perceive and interpret the world?

And this is the great gift of fiction: to be able to see the world through the eyes of another.

Yes, like many readers, I sometimes dive into a novel to escape from our humdrum or terrifying present into a pleasant dream of a world. Even in the most lightweight novels, though, we are asked to experience the events along with the protagonist. Every time we do that, we increase our capacity for empathy.

Some stories stay with us for years. What is one that has stayed with you?

The Island of Sea Women, by Lisa See

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The island is Jeju, off the South Korean coast. The sea women are the Haenyos, women who don’t use breathing equipment but rather hold their breath to dive to the sea floor to harvest seafood.

The story opens with Young-sook, an elderly retired Haenyo who hates being treated as a tourist attraction. She is especially peeved by the persistence of an American woman and her daughter who claim to be descended from Young-sook’s best friend Mi-ja. They show Young-sook a photograph which she pretends not to recognise.

We are then transported back to 1938. As the daughter of the chief of a Haenyo collective, Young-sook trains from a young age, both to learn the breathing technique called “Sumbisori” and to be in top physical condition. Since the women are the ones who earn money, men on the island stay home to care for the children. Meanwhile, the island is suffering under Japanese rule.

We follow Young-sook as she meets and befriends Mi-ja, who is an outcast because her parents collaborated the Japanese. The girls eventually begin training to become Haenyos, starting out as “baby divers” and gradually becoming more proficient. They work as a team farming the wet fields (the sea) and the dry fields (the vegetable garden). Much as Young-sook loves being in the sea, she can never forget the danger involved, repeating the mantra “Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back. In this world, the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life.”

The situation worsens during World War II, as the Japanese impress young men from the island into their army and send refugees to the island, where there is already too little food. The end of the war brings a new nightmare, as the Americans install a dictator in South Korea and help his forces further tyrannize the island. The carnages on top of the great poverty on the island makes for difficult reading at some points.

The two girls find themselves at odds as they enter arranged marriages. The progress and zig-zags of their friendship are one of the best things in the story, beautifully rendered. The story occasionally flashes forward to 2008, when the Americans continue to pester the elderly Young-sook, wanting to tell her about Mi-ja’s fate.

The details of the culture on the island, the history of the people there, and most of all the immersive experience of diving with the Haenyos are what make the story memorable. Meticulously researched, with additional information on the author’s website, we are privileged to learn about a way of life that has now almost disappeared.

Perhaps the hardest task for a novelist is inserting a trail of breadcrumbs such that the ending comes as a surprise, yet perfectly obvious looking back over the story. What makes it hard is the range of readers: I know from my book clubs that some people catch on right away, while others may still need an explanation even after finishing a book.

For me, with this book, I saw the answers to the story questions too early and wondered through much of the book why the characters were not able to see them as well. Still, though the story of the friendship sagged a little, for me at least, the story of the sea women and their island did not. I strongly recommend this book.

Have you ever heard of the Haenyos?

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters

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After the carnage of the Great War, many women in England found themselves condemned to spinsterhood. That’s not why in 1922 Frances Wray remains unmarried and living with her mother in South London, where their lives are circumscribed by the endless domestic chores, church on Sundays, and occasional visits with a few friends.

Frances does the domestic work, her mother being elderly and still grieving for the loss of her sons in the war. They once had a servant, but after the death of Frances’s father, the two women discovered that he had left them nothing but debts. By the time of the story, they have decided that their only recourse is to take in lodgers, dressing up the idea by calling them paying guests.

Enter Lillian and Leonard Barber. Members of the “clerk class,” they take up residence in the newly created apartment on the second floor and quickly change the atmosphere of the house, with their lively music and visits from Lillian’s rambunctious, working class family. Still the Wray women are more puzzled than distressed. What upsets the applecart is Frances’s growing attraction to Lillian.

The author brilliantly captures the peculiar intimacy of families sharing a wall, something I’m familiar with from living in rowhouses, triple-deckers, and a duplex (aka semi-detached). You try not to listen, but nonetheless find yourself having an unwelcome familiarity with their routines. Sometimes you even speculate about what’s going on over there.

Vividly captured as well is the domestic life of the period. The author gives us enough of Frances’s routine to understand what a burden housework was before the “labor-saving” devices we are accustomed to, without letting those passages become boring. She does this by exquisite detail, carefully chosen, and sometimes by making them part of action scenes.

I was surprised and impressed by the author’s handling of the class differences between the three families. Though never coming out and saying something like They are not our sort, Mrs. Wray remains aloof from the Barbers and Lillian’s family. However, Frances begins to enter the lives of both and seems to be free of that sort of class consciousness.

In fact, the psychological portrayal of Frances is what helped me stick with this overlong book. A fascinating character to start with, Frances changes with exposure to new information or outlooks, each transformation believable within the story.

The other thing that kept me going was the narrator Juliet Stevenson, one of my favorite actors. Having her voice in my ear is always a pleasure.

Who are your favorite audiobook narrators?

Matrix, by Lauren Groff

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In 1148, Marie de France at 17 has been running her family’s estates since the death of her parents and trying to avoid coming to the attention of Eleanor of Aquitaine, with whom she has a familial connection. When Eleanor does notice her, she declares the tall, sturdy girl with a rural accent too gauche for marriage or life at court, and sends her to England to be prioress of a run-down abbey.

Initially homesick and shocked by the poverty and near-starvation of the nuns, Marie summons the strength of her predecessors: a long line of women warriors and crusaders.

Fine then, she thinks with bitterness. She will stay in this wretched place and make the best of the life given her. She will do all that she can do to exalt herself on this worldly plane. She will make those who cast her out sorry for what they’ve done. One day they will see the majesty she holds within herself and feel awe.

She sets herself to rebuilding the abbey’s prosperity, its fields and sheepfolds, its income-producing business of copying illuminated manuscripts, and its body of nuns. These new sisters—some prickly older women, some giggling girls, some laborers—support her as she finds their hidden talents and sets them to work that best uses their strengths. Later she begins to have visions, which call on her to create an “island of women” protected from men and the corrupt world by a massive labyrinth: Marie hiding once again from a misogynistic world, this time with her sisters.

Fueled by Groff’s energetic prose, the book traces Marie’s entire life at the abbey, her many successes and rare failures. The world of the abbey comes alive, the texture of its life, the cold of early-morning prayers, the taste of a rare treat, the ways of healing. The handful of nuns we get to know are presented as memorable individuals with their own strengths and flaws.

In this fictional Marie, Groff combines two historical characters: Marie de France, a 12th century French poetess who wrote a collection of lais about courtly romance, and Marie d’Anjou, Abbess of Shaftesbury. There is a theory that they might be the same person, but it is unproven. I would have liked to hear more about Marie the poetess, but accept that is not this book.

Here Groff instead gives us a model of a powerful, indomitable woman, canny and visionary, much like Eleanor of Aquitaine but with a Christian moral code. While I love seeing a strong woman succeed, Marie’s accomplishments strain my credulity. Building the maze that protects the abbey like Briar Rose’s castle is one thing, but going on to design and build new machines, roads, dams, and fortifications with military precision?

Where the book started to lose steam for me was when challenge after challenge is met and defeated by Marie immediately. I love her bent for management, her practicality. I love her foresight and the political acumen that leads her to create an international network of spies (often women) and protectors. I appreciate the narrow path she walks between power and pride.

Yet, after a while, the stakes begin to seem very low once we know that Marie’s superpowers will resolve every issue within a few pages. I found it particularly hard to believe that an incipient cult among the young nuns and, later, a revolt about Marie’s going against the church’s teachings would both simply evaporate.

Still, the powerful writing carries the book. As a utopian vision, it reminds me of Groff’s Arcadia which I read recently, about a commune. That book dealt closely with the interpersonal tensions and rivalries that warred with the communal ideals of the families. I expected more of that here, more of the interactions between the sisters, the inevitable conflicts that arise among a group of people living together, but Marie’s iron hand seems to preclude them.

In the end, I’m glad I read this story of a powerful woman. Marie will stay with me for a long time.

Have you read anything by Lauren Groff? What did you think of it?