Book of the Day Roundup: March 6-10, 2023
La Duchesse
The Life of Marie de Vignerot—Cardinal Richelieu’s Forgotten Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France
Bronwen McShea
Pegasus Books
Hardcover $28.95 (480pp)
978-1-63936-347-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Filled with dramatic, often violent, seventeenth-century court and clergy intrigues, Bronwen McShea’s La Duchesse is meticulous—the “first fully researched modern biography of Vignerot.”
Vignerot would have been a minor rural aristocrat had she not been the widowed protégé and heir of her powerful uncle, Cardinal Richelieu. His ascension into France’s highest royal and ecclesiastical echelons swept her into influential roles. She was the confidante of the Queen Regent (for the future Louis XIV); a literary patron and salon hostess; a Peer of France; a philanthropist and planner for Catholic charities; and a foreign policy and military strategist as Governor of Le Havre.
Nonetheless, the story of this “force of nature” has been cast to the shadows by previous historians and biographers, which McShea attributes to various biases and motives. McShea analyzed scores of documents from several centuries and in several languages to unearth a fuller, entertaining profile of Vignerot and her legacy. Inviting details about court customs, fashion, royal entertainments, and transportation embellish this chronicle with a huge cast of historical figures and shifting alliances during France’s civil war and the Thirty Years’ War.
While Vignerot planned and financed religious missions before Richelieu’s death in 1642, the enormous largesse of her inheritance enabled her to expand these activities manyfold for the next three decades. She sponsored hospitals, seminaries, missions in Africa, New France, and Asia, and charitable work by various Catholic orders throughout France. She had a particular interest in women’s charities and education, as well as in the work of the future Saint Vincent de Paul, known for his devotions to the poor, but not often characterized as being so cautious as he is here.
La Duchesse adds much to church history and restores its intriguing and formidable subject to seventeenth-century France’s center stage.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (February 27, 2023)
The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales
Vasily Eroshenko
Adam Kuplowsky, translator
Columbia University Press
Softcover $25.00 (296pp)
978-0-231-20769-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Vasily Eroshenko uses simple tales to explore powerful, complex morals in The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales.
Storytellers have long used fairy tales and children’s stories as a means of delivering radical, even subversive messages to their audience. Such was the case with the blind Ukrainian writer Vasily Eroshenko. Eroshenko’s tales often feature innocent-seeming creatures—including a religious young carp, a scholarly mouse, and a socialist canary—who are forced to reckon with the world’s cruelty and their own unwarranted optimism. The introduction contains a biography of Eroshenko’s restless, fascinating life that places the stories that follow in proper context and is just as absorbing as any of them.
The stories themselves were written during Eroshenko’s time in Japan and China. In the Japanese stories, the characters are often optimistic at the start, filled with naïve love for everyone around them. No sooner do they express these feelings than others—cynical and hardened to the ways of the world—beat them down. In many cases, they must pay the ultimate price for their innocence. The Chinese stories feature Eroshenko himself as the recipient of tales from the denizens of his new city, Beijing. The appendix includes autobiographical pieces.
Deceptive in their simplicity, the stories deliver ruthless, incisive morals that rebuke humans for their abuse of nature and each other. Only one includes a happy ending. Eroshenko’s fairy tales are by turns quaint and heartbreaking, engrossing and thought-provoking. Their evergreen messages—pertaining to equality, political freedom, and the humane treatment of animals—feel as fresh and relevant now as they were a century ago.
The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales illustrates serious topics through short, fanciful tales featuring animals, humans, and forces of nature.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (February 27, 2023)
Dog on Fire
Terese Svoboda
Flyover Fiction
Softcover $21.95 (150pp)
978-1-4962-3516-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Nebraska poet Terese Svoboda’s haunting novel Dog on Fire, a small town reels in the wake of a tragedy.
In a dusty town in contemporary times, an unnamed man dies under mysterious circumstances. In the months that follow his loss, two women—his girlfriend, Aphra, who is disrespected in their community; and his sister, who suspects Aphra of some culpability in his death—grieve him, trying to piece together their lives, relationships, and memories in his absence. Their conflicting takes on events push the story forward.
In this curated, sprawling, nonlinear tale, the prose is directed by calculated discomfort; this is apparent in every nook and cranny of the novel. Most of the characters are without names. There are scenes of animal abuse; people see specters; and neighbors are cruel when interacting with one another. These scenes are engaging and sometimes even humorous; their lines are poetic in their sensibilities.
The story’s pieces seem random at first, but they are all planted with good reason. Together, they are used to flesh out life in the women’s small town, and to reveal the nature of the stories that people tell themselves after senseless tragedies change their lives forever. As the short chapters bounce between perspectives and timelines, careful, focused audiences will develop a clear understanding of their collective meaning. Through each of the uncomfortable scenes, an ultimate payoff is secured; the story is tied together in the book’s dismal, but still satisfying, conclusion.
In the magical literary novel Dog on Fire, two different women in a small town move through a complicated grieving process.
LILY DETAEYE (February 27, 2023)
My Grandpa, My Tree, and Me
Roxanne Troup
Kendra Binney, illustrator
Yeehoo Press
Hardcover $17.99 (40pp)
978-1-953458-55-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A young girl’s grandfather plants a pecan tree when she is born and teaches her to care for it in this story that is at once an education on pecan farming and a reminder of the importance of family histories and legacies. The royal blue of the farmhouse roof, bright red of the farm equipment, and dashes of yellow flowers stand out against a soft palette of nature’s blues, greens, and browns in the detailed, textured illustrations.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (February 27, 2023)
Quantum Radio
A. G. Riddle
Head of Zeus
Hardcover $25.95 (512pp)
978-1-80328-169-8
Buy: Amazon
Four people will determine the fate of multiple worlds in A. G. Riddle’s Quantum Radio.
All Ty ever wanted was to use science to unlock the universe’s secrets. But after a historic breakthrough, other forces seek to control what Ty has discovered—and to kill whoever gets in their way. Accompanied by three others with a mysterious connection to his discovery, Ty goes on a mission to rewrite history and stop a conspiracy so big that a single universe cannot contain it.
The novel’s first part follows Ty as he scrambles to interpret his findings. Each revelation leads to new questions and greater dangers until he and his companions are forced to take drastic action. This leads into the book’s second and third parts, which are powered by a different kind of tension: the knowledge that, if they fail, an entire world will forever succumb to fascism. Clever historical twists are used to imagine how an Axis victory might have brought World War II to a very different conclusion (though the fact that the story ignores the Holocaust while relying on the Third Reich’s continued presence is odd).
The relationships between Ty and the rest are marked by differences; still, they work together well, learning from and listening to one another as they search for solutions that all can live with. That includes the decision all four must make regarding their own shared future, the vast physical and moral implications of which have yet to be explored. No matter what happens next, Ty must come to grips with the fact that everything he thought he knew about the universe, his family, and the person he is supposed to be is wrong.
Quantum Radio is a tense novel in which scientists race against time to help humanity determine its own destiny.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (February 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
