5/11/2023 0 Comments Katherine chen joan![]() ![]() When we first meet Joan, she’s a child observing other children fight in her tiny village of Donrémy. The novel follows Joan’s trajectory from lowly peasant to confidant of Charles VII (the Dauphin and dispossessed heir to the French throne) to leader of the French army and sudden folk hero. ![]() What drives Joan isn’t the voice of God but the destruction of her village by brutal English soldiers, along with an intensely personal loss. Chen’s reimagined Joan is hungry, earthy and scrappy-a natural fighter. Chen’s second novel, Joan, leaves behind the pious maiden and her visions and voices. And yet the martyr’s name calls up an array of familiar mythic images: a pious, perhaps delusional 15th-century French maiden visited by visions and voices, a young woman with a sword in her hand, in a time of endless war between France and England. To the 21st-century reader, Joan of Arc may feel faraway and quaint, like a figure in an ancient stained-glass window. ![]()
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