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Joan Chase's subtle story of three generations of women negotiating lifetimes of ojoy and ruino deserves its place alongside such achievements as Marilynne Robinson's Housekeepingand Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. The Queen of Persia is in fact Gram, who presides over an Ohio farmhouse teeming with daughters, granddaughters, and the occasional son-in-law. For the youngest generation, the four girls who together narrate the novel, the farm is a kind of Eden, at once life-giving and the locus of terrible discoveries about desire and loss. The girls bicker and scrap, whisper secrets at bedtime, and above all watch as their mothers draft templates of womanhood that they will come to either reject or embrace. Ingeniously orchestrated in overlapping, thematic narratives, the story of Gram, her five daughters, and her grandchildren reveals itself through the accumulation of emotional truths, reaching its heights in the decline of Grace, whose eventual death from cancer is a loss felt throughout the book. Set in the 1950s and '60s, During the Reign of the Queen of Persiais deeply rooted in its particular time and place, as the local, rural, and hardscrabble world the girls are born into remakes itself into a materially rich suburb, indistinguishable from so many others.… (more)
User reviews
The narrator is confusing as it is supposed told from the viewpoint of all four granddaughters who are cousins; two being the daughters of Grace, who dies of cancer surrounded by her sisters, Rachel, May, Eleanor, and Libby. At times the sisters are unbelievably cruel and nasty to each other; yet love and loyalty always win. They all seem to have terrible taste in men as all the men in the book are weak.
I gave this only a three due to the confusing narrator. At times, I wasn't really sure who was speaking. And, some of the situations just did not seem to fit the 1950's small town; while others were right on. Not sure why this is considered a "classic" other than the fact that it might be a good study in female family relationships.
One of the interesting things for me was the narration of the book. It's a first person narration, but from the point of view of all four girls as a collective, so the dominant pronoun is "we". All of the older generation of daughters are referred to as "Aunt so and so", even though some of these Aunts are mother to some of the narrators. I was confused at first, but came to really like it. It's an interesting way of describing identity, and I can't really recall another book that has used this same technique. I guess sort of like a greek chorus, but they weren't commentating on events, they were living them.
This won't be for everyone - it's a bit quirky and a bit depressing - but I quite liked it.