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Title details for During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase - Available

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase
Meghan O'Rourke
ebook
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Set on a small Ohio farm, this “moving, unusual, and accomplished” multigenerational family saga is a “Norman Rockwell painting gone bad” as it explores grief, motherhood, and coming-of-age in Middle America (Margaret Atwood).
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.
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Publisher: New York Review Books

Kindle Book

  • Release date: April 15, 2014

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781590177396
  • Release date: April 15, 2014

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9781590177396
  • File size: 550 KB
  • Release date: April 15, 2014

Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Fiction Literature

Languages

English

Set on a small Ohio farm, this “moving, unusual, and accomplished” multigenerational family saga is a “Norman Rockwell painting gone bad” as it explores grief, motherhood, and coming-of-age in Middle America (Margaret Atwood).
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.
Expand title description text
Fiction Literature
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