Matrix
Lauren Groff · 2021
Marie de France arrives as a teenage castoff at a crumbling nunnery and builds it into a kingdom. Groff's medieval novel is a vision of female power, mysticism, and queer desire that feels totally contemporary while being historically meticulous. The historical novel as speculative fiction.
The case against
Marie wins. Then wins again: the abbey prospers, the labyrinth gets built, every scheme lands, and the novel runs out of resistance halfway through. Her dozens of fellow nuns blur into a single wimpled mass, and Groff's incantatory present tense holds one lyric pitch for the entire book. A vision of female power that forgot to include an antagonist.
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