During the Reign of the Queen of Persia
  • Published: 15 April 2014
  • ISBN: 9781590177150
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

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A story of three generations of women living on a farm in rural Ohio, where the men are more often enemies than friends and the women grow and learn both from and in opposition to their female ancestors as they must realize a world that is born from the past but rooted in the present.

A multigenerational family drama about grief, motherhood, and coming of age, all taking place on an Ohio farm.

Joan Chase’s subtle story of three generations of women negotiating lifetimes of “joy and ruin” deserves its place alongside such achievements as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.

The Queen of Persia is not an exotic figure but a fierce Ohio farmwife who presides over a household of daughters and granddaughters. The novel tells their stories through the eyes of the youngest members of the family, four cousins who spend summers on the farm, for them both a life-giving Eden and the source of terrible discoveries about desire and loss. The girls bicker and scrap, they whisper secrets at bedtime, and above all, they observe the kinds of women their mothers are and wonder what kind of women they will become. But always present is the family’s great trauma, the decline and eventual death from cancer of Gram’s daughter Grace.

A powerful story about family ties and tensions, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a book about place, charting the transformation of the old hardscrabble Midwest into the commercial wilderness of modern America.
  • Published: 15 April 2014
  • ISBN: 9781590177150
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Praise for During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

"Moving, unusual and accomplished.... During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is a Norman Rockwell painting gone bad, the underside of the idyllic hometown, main-street, down-on-the-farm dream of Middle America.... The prose is limpid, the characterization vibrant, the dialogue crisp.... In its evocative power, its understated skill, the vividness of its description, its noncosmopolitan setting and its orientation toward the next-to-immediate past, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia takes its place among several other recent works that are also concerned with the female matrix: Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women and, in a Southern variant, Helen Henslee's Pretty Redwing. This is excellent company, and During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is an important debut by a fine new writer." --Margaret Atwood, The New York Times

"Absorbing and wonderfully written." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Brilliant and compelling.... A lush lyrical world of unsparing reality." --The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"During the Reign of the Queen of Persia offers an exoticism of the emotions and daily life exhilarated with the richness and evocativeness of poetry. It is also one of the few contemporary novels of women's lives for which one need make no allowances, grant no compromised sympathy. Joan Chase hasn't any message of visible politics, simply an artist's passion for rendering reality accurately, a love of the tactile world, of sensual experience, and a willingness to confront, without resolving, her characters' grievous ambiguities.... Splendid and durable." --The Washington Post Book World

"Eloquent, compelling, and honest." --San Francisco Chronicle Review

"Appealing and original.... Read the novel once for the characters, sorting out the strands of their lives, seen through eyes gone from innocence to knowing. It should be read again immediately for its language and imagery, the memory of a dappled sunshine, of the indomitable fierce Gram, and for its understanding of an endangered species called the American family." --Detroit Free Press

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