![]() ![]() Vee, wife of an ambitious senator in 1970s Washington, finds herself a player in a House of Cards–type scenario, pressured toward sexual humiliation by her unscrupulous husband. Her magical powers can bring on a shocking physical transformation or reanimate a skeletal bird, yet she is still a prisoner in a gilded cage, mother to an heir, frustrated daughter of an imperiled tribe. Esther, selected from 40 virgins to be the second queen-after her predecessor, Vashti, was banished (or worse)-is the strangest. All three are grappling-some more dangerously than others-with aspects of male power versus their own self-determination. ![]() Esther, the Old Testament teenager who reluctantly married a Persian king and saved her people, is connected across the ages to two more contemporary women in a sinuous, thoughtful braid of women’s unceasing struggles for liberty and identity.īiblical Esther, second-wave feminist Vee, and contemporary mother-of-two Lily are the women whose narrative strands and differing yet sometimes parallel dilemmas are interwoven in Solomon’s ( Leaving Lucy Pear, 2016, etc.) questing, unpredictable new novel. ![]()
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