During the Reign of the Queen of Persia-Fast Shipping

Description

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

JoanChase’s subtle story of three generations of women negotiatinglifetimes of “joy and ruin” deserves its place alongside suchachievements as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.

TheQueen of Persia is not an exotic figure but a fierce Ohio farmwife whopresides over a household of daughters and granddaughters. The noveltells their stories through the eyes of the youngest members of thefamily, four cousins who spend summers on the farm, for them both alife-giving Eden and the source of terrible discoveries about desire andloss. The girls bicker and scrap, they whisper secrets at bedtime, andabove all, they observe the kinds of women their mothers are and wonderwhat kind of women they will become. But always present is the family’sgreat trauma, the decline and eventual death from cancer of Gram’sdaughter 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 oldhardscrabble Midwest into the commercial wilderness of modern America.