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.