During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase, Meghan O'Rourke (Introduction)

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.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Classics, American, Novels, The United States Of America

215 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5) This modern classic, unfairly forgotten, deserves to be considered on par with A Thousand Acres (Jane Smiley) and Stoner (John Williams). It won a PEN/Hemingway first novel prize in 1984. Luckily, last year’s NYRB Classics reprint might just bring it the attention it deserves.

Told in the relatively rare first-person plural (“we” – a perspective I love) and set on an Ohio farm, the novel captures what four girl cousins on the cusp of adolescence learn and remember about their troubled family. The Krauss clan is peculiarly matriarchal, ruled by Gram – whose imperiousness (the cousins also describe her as “flamboyantly, joylessly unpredictable”) has earned her the nickname alluded to in the title. She has five daughters and four granddaughters who spend summers on the farm with her: Anne and Katie are Aunt Grace’s daughters, and Celia and Jenny are Aunt Libby’s – but as is so often the case with the first-person plural, the collective perspective means that the girls’ identities and experiences blur into one:

“For as long as we could remember we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world…most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.”

There is a certain timelessness to the novel; it was first published in 1983, so I presume it is set in the 1980s, but it could just as easily (except for a few details) be the 1950s or even the 1920s. Chase opens with a long, tender description of the kind of farmland that many of us would just cruise by on the highway and never appreciate:

“In northern Ohio there is a county of some hundred thousand arable acres which breaks with the lake region flatland and begins to roll and climb, and to change into rural settings: roadside clusters of houses, small settlements that repose on the edge of nowhere, single lane bridges, backwater country stores with a single rusting gas pump...”

Unsurprisingly, there are numerous strong female characters, not least Gram herself. “Here’s to female solidarity. May it last forever,” Uncle Neil sarcastically proclaims. My favorite of the women was probably Aunt Elinor, who has left her country upbringing behind and fully embraced New York City, getting her teeth straightened and adopting Christian Science. Yet there are also some terrific male characters. I found Uncle Dan the butcher particularly affecting, what with his quiet regret for the more exciting life he might have lived back in California, where he was stationed as a Marine; “counting the years, planning that one day he would take another job, would move, that his life would begin.” Even his hobby, playing the trombone, seems like just another reminder of life’s failures: “each time he played he got worse, instead of better, which he thought about summed up life anyway.”

Not too much happens in this novel; the main narrative driver is Aunt Grace’s long battle with breast cancer. And yet the novel bears such a weight of sadness and universality that it resembles a Shakespearean tragedy. There are many strange moments where accidents leave characters looking dead, only for them to moments later spring back up with only minor injuries. Fragility and wanton aggression – especially domestic violence – are constantly at odds. “What did we ever have around here but dying and fighting?” Gram asks. Like Stoner, Chase’s novel descends into a sort of muffled fatalism: her characters aren’t raging against the dying of the light, just fumbling through the dimness as best they can, as the farm heads into its inevitable decline. “All’s any of us can do is keep going, though there ain’t no sense to it,” Gram concludes. “I’m going to the picture show.”

If I could change one thing about this novel, it would surely be the title. It’s an interesting one, but misleading: I daresay most readers (including myself, before I reminded myself of the synopsis) would be expecting historical fiction set in the Middle East. The beautiful simplicity and rural setting of the novel reminded me very much of Marilynne Robinson’s work (especially Housekeeping, which also won the PEN/Hemingway Prize, two years before), and it might have fared better in the intervening decades if it had one of Robinson’s plain, one-word titles: “Cousins” might do, or perhaps “Kinship.” (Barring that, maybe “Krauss Drive.”)

There’s a surprising dearth of information about Joan Chase online, though Ohioana Authors has some helpful pages. She published two books after this one, another novel (The Evening Wolves) in 1989 and a story collection (Bonneville Blue) in 1991, but seems to have largely disappeared off the literary map – that is, until now, I hope.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is written in first person plural, from the point of view of 4 cousins, 2 sets of sisters who are very close in age. They are telling the story of their family, as they see it, and from family stories handed down from Gram and her five daughters. At any given time any one of the daughters may be living in Gram's huge house with 9 bedrooms, set on lots of land also owned by Gram. If this sounds like a nice family saga, think again.

Gram is a crusty old woman who cusses like a sailor, hates and resents her husband of 50 years (with some reason), wishes her kids and grandkids would all just leave her alone, and goes out every night to play bingo and bet on the horses. I liked her a lot. She had spirit.
The five sisters are very close, as are the four cousins. It is very much a matriarchal society, and the men in their lives either have to give up and give in, or go away. Gram did give birth to two sons, but they died right away, so they never had to be considered. The young girls have the freedom of the huge farm they live on, the nearby small town, and the relative safety of the 1950's. Through their eyes and ears we learn about the secrets and resentments, loves and lives, and whys and wherefores of Gram and her daughters.

I absolutely loved this book. I have seen it on all sorts of "must read" lists, and looked for it a long time before finally finding a mass market paperback copy at a used book sale. It was considered one of the best books published in 1983, but has been largely overlooked since then. And it was a first novel. I understand that NYRB has recently brought it back into print. Good for them. The writing is superb, the characters wonderful, (well, the women anyway), and the unusual narration of the cousins makes you feel like a fly on the wall of a big house with a lot of living going on inside.

[Camie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few chapters into the book and I'm wondering who is telling the story ? Well the answer is "We", an interesting all encompassing group of cousin’s voices that tell the story of their highly spirited, bingo playing, horse race betting, Gram ( the Queen of Persia herself) and her 5 grown daughters and 4 granddaughters ( the cousins) who all at certain points of time live in Gram’s big rural house in the 1950’s
It's a quiet tale of ordinary life events, where menfolk are mostly tolerated and Gram rules the roost. Now Gram herself, as far as I can tell, has never been any closer to Persia than the treasured Persian rugs on her floors, where tobacco spitting was a high offense and under which land titles, deeds, and such are hidden. Nevertheless it would be a brave soul who told her she wasn't indeed the queen of something !!
This book has won numerous awards, including the PEN/ Faulkner in 1984. I'm glad the NYRB has seen fit to reprint it. 4.5 stars

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had an unusual voice, or point of view, told in the first-person plural. We. The obligatory Introduction calls it an "idiosyncratic form."

The We are two sets of sisters, cousins to each other. So, think of the We as four girls, at least for storytelling purposes. No one of the girls ever becomes an "I". Their mothers are never "Mom" but, rather, Aunt Grace and Aunt Libby.

Through various circumstances, the girls live on Gram's farm. Their mothers live there too, and a couple of other aunts come to visit. The We is also family, and generational. There are men, but the males (those that aren't stillborn) are all outsiders, even those who marry in or are born to. For if you have a We, you must necessarily have a Them.

Not all the men are total jerks, just mostly so. Nor are the women saints. Ol' Gram is probably the worst of the bunch, unfortunately to the point of caricature. But if you're going to have a crusty old woman, then let her spout wisdom.

"Love takes time. You learn it over a long time being with a good man." It sounded like hard work and cold potatoes. "Marry a man who loves you more than you love him" -- That summed it up.

(We found this interesting but not compelling.)

[Claire Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this title, and I loved this book. Told in the first person plural voice of four cousins, this is almost a collection of linked short stories about one family, with each chapter focussing on one member. It's so good at conjuring up a rural Ohio 1950s childhood with a grandmother matriarch (nicknamed The Queen of Persia) ruling her five daughters, grandchildren (whose voice we hear) and sons in law. Very vivid.

[Katie Long · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much darker than I was expecting and I am here for it.

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

”’There’s nothing to be done about it,” Aunt Libby said now. She meant us, our family. Being female. She referred to it as if it was both a miracle and a calamity, that vein of fertility, that mother lode of passion buried within us, for joy and ruin. ‘None of us can no more than look at a man and we’ve having his baby.’”

As the (otherwise misleading) title suggests, this is a book about matriarchy and the matrilineal: a house full of women. ‘The Queen of Persia’ (her husband’s name for her) is mostly known in this novel as “Gram”: “with her soiled and faded apron and her exhausted face, marked like an old barn siding that had withstood blasts and abuse of all kinds, beyond any expression other than resignation and self-regard.” Hired out as a serving girl by the time she was a teenager, and married young to a taciturn and rough farmer, Gram’s predictable life of child-bearing and physical labour is disrupted by an unexpected legacy. When a rich, childless uncle leaves her a fortune, Gram builds a large house (“three floors and fourteen rooms”) and from that point onwards, she is calling the shots . . . or at least acting as benefactress and landlady, and giving all five daughters, four granddaughters and the various men of the family (all minor characters) the rough edge of her tongue.

One of the noteworthy things about this story is that it is told from the first-person-plural point of view - a narrative choice so unusual that I cannot think of another book that employs it. It’s the youngest generation, the granddaughters, who collectively tell the story of their family and the big house in Ohio. “There were the four of us then, two his own daughters, two his nieces, all of us born within two years of each other. Uncle Dan treated the four of us the very same and sometimes we thought we were the same - same blood, same rights of inheritance.” Interestingly, at the very moment that the narrative voice emphasises the “sameness” of the four girls, a disruption - a change - has begun. Celia, one of the girls, is suddenly differentiated; over the course of one summer, she physically ripens and suddenly becomes a magnet for all of the boys in the neighbourhood.

In her excellent introduction to the NYRB edition, Meghan O’Rourke describes the book (so aptly) as “less a plotted story than a deeply felt and powerfully inhabited symphony.” There are five “Parts” (not chapters) and the book is less interested in chronology and plot line than characterisation, atmosphere and cause and effect. Each “Part” takes the name of a character, but all of the characters are too interwoven to exist separately of each other. The major event of the novel is the death of Grace, mother to two of the girls (Anne and Katie). This is not so much of a spoiler, as Grace’s death has already happened when the story begins. The four granddaughters all have names, and different physical and emotional characteristics, but that narrative voice of We/Our constantly resists their separateness.

Even more so than the granddaughters, Gram’s five daughters have different characteristics and have chosen different paths in life. This is most obvious in the case of (“Aunt”) Elinor, who is a career woman in New York City. Like Gram, she enjoys bestowing gifts on the others. (Money is definitely power in this book, and most of the men are emasculated by their lack of it.) When Grace is dying, Elinor imposes her Christian Scientist beliefs upon the household and attempts to control events - “events” being life and death. Gram’s skepticism and fatalism contrast sharply with her daughter Elinor’s belief in prayer and the power of positive thinking.

But somehow these individual differences, as large as they may be, are less important than the novel’s insistence on the female condition. Or maybe it’s the human condition. Sex leads to love (maybe), marriage (maybe) and children (maybe), but not happy endings. As O’Rourke describes it, “Sex is the charge that turns love, all too often, into hardship and conflict for both men and women.”

Despite being given top billing in the title, Gram is not obviously the story’s protagonist- and yet her model of enduring life casts a long shadow. On the day of her daughter’s funeral, she dresses up and takes herself off to the picture show. “All’s any of us can do is keep going, though there ain’t no sense to it.”

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A reread. I'd read this 36 years ago but hadn't much liked it. In fact, I hadn't liked it enough to keep the edition I'd read at the time. I enjoyed this reading a lot.

It's a novel reflecting the points of view of its women characters. Three generations of the Krauss family gather during the summers of the 1950s on their farm outside Sherwood, Ohio. The matriarch is the curmudgeonly Gram. Her husband is a kind of stormy outcast who resentfully accepts Gram's right of place at the family's head and contents himself with caring for the animals. They have 5 daughters, and there are 3 husbands who're portrayed as feckless. This portrayal comes through because Gram disapproves of everything, especially them, and by the fact that the portrayals of character and event come to us through the youngest generation--Celia, Jenny, Anne, and Katie--the cousins who so easily absorb the perspectives of the family's stronger females. The novel's interestingly told in a 1st person made up collectively of these 4 young girls, what Meghan O'Rourke in her "Introduction" explains as a narrative "we."

These characters are suggested as being larger than they seem. There's a kind of Greek pantheon at work in the novel. The 4 cousins act a little like a chorus commenting on the ebb and flow of conflicts within the family as they grow over successive summers. They also delight in the nature evident around the farm. Their fast-paced jumping in the rafters of the barn and at frolicking in the river suggest them as the nymphs of the place. Spirit is a frequently-used word in the novel. One of the husbands serves as a Pan or satyr figure gliding and manipulating among the 5 sisters. The farm is at least once referred to as a kingdom. The summers the cousins spend there are idyllic.

Until...what the cousins learn is life and death. They observe and take their cues from the adults around them, particularly the 5 sisters. Over the course of the summers spent there many changes come to the family. But the hardest--loss--comes during the iron cold of winter. Because it's foreshadowed by character circumstances as well as Chase's forlorn tone and by the mournful sound of the trombone played by one of the husbands, the reader can feel heartache approach. This is a sad novel.

[Misha · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, published in 1983,  is set in the 1950s and is about the lives of women/girls of a Ohio small-town family. The 'Queen of Persia' refers to the family matriarch, the grandmother who governs her five daughters and four granddaughters. 

I adored the book. It's so vivid, alive, tender, raw... one of those books that linger. The novel has an unusual narrative perspective, told through 'we', the collective POV of the four granddaughters. 'We' imbues agency to the women. The 'we' dominate, they are reckless, feral, tempestuous, and above all, intertwined together in a powerful love, found only among sisters. Being a part of a 'sisterhood' myself, I can attest to how profoundly real this book feels, like bringing alive all my feelings about being a sister - how it has saved and uplifted me.  The use of 'we' makes the narrative incredibly intimate and detached all at once.

Time is all over the place in this book, going back and forth, further strengthening the feeling of the women across generations being 'one', their experiences different but also the same. Playing with time like this is also clever because you discover an additional insight about a character later on, illuminating their actions in the earlier chapters. Like peeling off layers. 

The book deals with desire, marriage, death, grief, family dysfunctions. These women are imperfect - envious, full of rage, full of yearning for things never gained, selfish. The family dynamics represent all the ugliness of a real family. As a reader, you are pulled into it and feel it all so viscerally. There is no big plot point in this, it's about ordinary things made profound and meaningful.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

I live for those literary "whafuck?!" moments when you read something that you'd found blindly, that, if described to you, would have immediately excoriated and expelled from your reading horizons for sounding too much like an Oprah "Book"-of-the-Moment selection.
"During the Reign" is about a collective narrator (using the rare "We") of four teenage girls observing their mothers and their grandmother in Ohio during the 1950s. Sounds not so good, right?
Wrong. It's darkly astounding, written in a kind of gently poetic nightmare style that invokes all kinds of shit that I like. Plus, what it's really about is four teenage girls coming of age and wrestling with parts of the collective narrator peeling off with men while the domineering and shitty grandmother holds court in the shambling farmhouse, lording over her five daughters who are all (except one) little more than lower-class white trash wanderers behind their shittier husbands. And one of them is dying of cancer, too. There's a grandfather, a mysterious, cursing drunkard who hates cheese and whom everyone despises.
It's such a strange novel, that I'll leave it at that. Beautiful and weird.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

My expectations going into Chase's debut novel were somewhat low. I feared that it would be a work of dull pastoral fiction filled with tedious details of domestic life. I was immediately struck by the unique choice of narrative voice in During the Reign etc. It is narrated in first-person plural from the viewpoint of 4 adolescent females. The events are narrated in a non-chronological order & take place during the summer, when two of the characters (Anne & Katie) are on the farm with their cousins Celia & Jenny. In her review in the NY Times, Atwood wrote, ''During the Reign of the Queen of Persia' is a Norman Rockwell painting gone bad" & I couldn't agree more. This is at once both a realistic look at the challenges faced by women & the support that they offer one another; while also being an impressionistic recollection of adolescence, with all of the attending joys & griefs. I was profoundly moved by certain passages in this novel (for example "With the vanishing of Aunt Grace, something that had bound us together and had given us strength beyond the ordinary had vanished too. Now we were simply going on, with what we'd ended up with, which was not enough but would have to do.") I thought that this was absolutely fantastic.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book I wanted to love. On the surface, it has all the things I like: family saga, strong women, enormous houses that are characters in their own right (write?), and midwestern summers. Despite all that and all the wonderful things I'd heard about this book on NPR and elsewhere, this novel fell a bit flat for me. It wasn't bad it just wasn't as rich or lush as I'd imagined.

There were some wonderful passages. Chase allows you to really feel the confusion of growing up in this kind of big, entangled family. I liked the way that, like a memory, the book was told out of order-- Celia's life first, then aunt Grace's story and the rest of the family saga. I'm glad I read it but I'm not sure I'll recommend it to others in the future.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Women in ruins... this is raw, not a story to dive into if you're looking for silly romantic happy endings and glitter explosions. Is the weight of sadness crushing, yes it is, but I have to admit sometimes it is refreshing to read a story that relates more to actual realistic happenings in human relations than some fantasy. This story is about three generations of women growing up on an Ohio farm, sisters and cousins to each other, daughters to Gram (farmer's wife and grandmother) who is bitter and loves nothing more than time of her own. Gram is a tough bird, to say the least, and I can already imagine many readers judging her as cold. But if you can think about the hard ways she lived, the myriad of ways she saw women all used up and tossed like an empty husk by men it's easy to understand her dried up heart. This sentence from the story nails it, 'Gram sometimes seemed like the child of her daughters, the bad willful one they couldn't do a thing with but loved the best because of her charm and daring.' Certainly there are beautiful love stories in the past, but many of us know time has never really been easy nor kind to women. Even beauty isn't a prelude to a happy future, and often the men end up being a dead end. Children move back, Gram's own daughter Grace comes home to die and the young grand-daughters are the eyes witnessing the suffering. There is buckets of defeat in many of the characters, and violations that seem (in this story) to be a women's lot in life. The reader will swallow this down and it will burn from the throat to the stomach because it is poisonous, kind of like some families. Joking aside, it intimately probes the characters until you feel you are living with this wild bunch. It isn't sweet chick-lit, though the theme is sisterhood because there isn't going to be any prince charming swooping in rescuing anyone, in fact in the story the men are more likely to be stumbling drunk. Women were often not lucky enough to have their needs met, often spent a lot of time sucked dry with people needing, and grasping. I felt a little dried up after reading it, and it brought to mind memoirs I've read in he past of what women of early times have suffered through. So is this feminist? Yes and no. I can't imagine many modern day women lining up to be 'put upon' the way Gram is. If you can take Gram as someone worn out from the ugliness of life then maybe you can get through it. Not for everyone. Know too that there is pleasure to be had and charm, mostly with the girls running about the farm, it is at times descriptively beautiful. They often seem to share skin, so close are all the women in the family. You need to be alone with this novel, it isn't a light read. It's heavy but there is something about it that clings to you.

Some excerpts:

'His face looked as though it had rained all his summers, his eyes gray from clouds that had passed over his heart.'

"That thing reminds me of everything I'll never have."Uncle Dan said.

"She whacked away at her own remnants of romanticism as if she could still be caught of guard and swallowed whole."

"She'd seen more than enough of that particular misery- wedlock forced on a resentful man who would never let you forget it."

"There was never any hiding from Aunt Libby, sniffing and patrolling, everything figured out. Other people talked, around her, of weather or shopping. Aunt Libby half-listened, preoccupied with her own divinations and prophecies."

"...she was ugly to us- a woman spurned and rejected. Poisoned, she would poison us."

[TaraShea Nesbit · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's easy to see why this book will be rereleased by NYRB in April. It's a 1st person plural pov story set in Ohio from the perspective of a group of girl cousins as they navigate the alluring and strange parts of adolescence, observing their grandmother, aunt, uncle, and older cousin Celia: "There has been a lover once. We imagined him for ourselves. The purple clouds were plowing in on the wind from a darker distance..." (31). Gorgeous, subtle, and so very much a conjuring of my home state.

[Christina Ek · Rating 5 out of 5]

About five sisters growing up in a small Ohio town, under the reign of their force-of-nature mother who then rules over their children. Innovative structure, razor-sharp observations, vivid settings and situations, strong women characters, and masterful writing draw the reader inside this early 20th century world; I could not put this down.
Not for the faint-of-heart.

[Susan]

First read almost 40 years ago. . .

[Marc Gerstein · Rating 1 out of 5]

The most interesting thing about this first (and prize-winning) book published by author Joan Chase at the age of 46 is the 1983 NY Times review by Margaret Atwood, who describes it as “a Norman Rockwell painting gone bad.” Atwood then goes on to say the book is “organized musically, with themes recurring in different keys, rather than linearly, along the train-track lines of cause-and-effect plot. Time overlaps and doubles back on itself, so that events are superimposed, as in a palimpsest, or in memory itself, for this is also a novel about memory, about all the things that the collective ‘we’ will be unable, in the unwritten future, to forget.”

Lest one fear the book is difficult to read, Atwood goes on to reassure the world that “it isn't: The prose is limpid, the characterization vibrant, the dialogue crisp.”

In my opinion, Atwood was full of shit.

I like the Rockwell line, but the book is not “organized musically . . . .” It’s organized badly. The prose is not limpid. It’s insipid. The dialogue isn’t crisp. It’s inane. I’ll add that character development is non-existent, even for Gran, the so-called Queen of Persia, who we are led (by the title and the basic setup) to expect will be a strong matriarch.

Part One of the book, although it starts like a shallow imitation of “Little Women,” actually builds interest as it progresses and ends with an intriguing but subtle power move by Gran to address a romantic tangle involving one of the four cousins who narrate in the plural first person. So despite the slow start, I though this might turn out good after all. But Part Two quickly dashes whatever level of interest the reader had at the end of Part One and goes on the reveal that deep down, Gran’s “strength” is dumb luck. In a “deus ex macina” stunt such as ancient Greek dramatists used at the ends of their plays, Chase, early in the novel, transitions Lil (Gran’s name) from a poor domestic laborer who had bad tase in men and picked a husband who was lousy in bed into an independent woman of means by having a relative approach her at a family reunion to give a her a lot of supposedly inherited wealth. So super-woman’s powers are sourced similarly to those of Donald Trump (lucky gene pool).

As to the rest of this, if Chase has devoted one-tenth of the effort toward developing any characters as she did to describing a funeral, she might have had something that would have actually justified bringing this long-out-of-print book back to life in 2014. (Am I a bad person because I hate a novel that, to the extent it has any center at all, seems to hang its balance on a character who has a lingering painful death as a result of cancer? Whatever.)

As noted, this first novel did win a prize, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, a prize given to a first-time writer. Not sure what alternative choices there were for that year’s competition, but this would have been a one-hit-wonder, assuming it was a hit back in 1983. Anyway, this came out just before the emergence of the literary version of the brat pack; Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, Brett Easton Ellis, et. al. The literary merits of the latter crew are debatable, (but even if they sucked, they definitely were not boring) and I wonder if the group that followed had anything to do with Persia's descent into going out of print. (Back then, I was inhaling all the contemporary stuff that was coming out -- I used to go at night to the old Coliseum bookstore in NYC and to Shakespeare & Co. on Sundays, etc., and always leave with as many Vintage Contemporaries and rival imprints as I could afford and carry -- and for the life of me, I absolutely cannot remember "During the Reign of Queen of Persia.") Chase did publish a couple of things afterward that as far as I can gather, had zero impact.

[Nikhil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this novel, I was captivated by both the casual violence of girlhood/adulthood experienced by the narrators and their mothers and grandmother, and by the quality of the prose that so successfully invoked memory and induced a trance-like reading state. The text speaks to how trauma can be normalized and to how violence and disappointment (along with joy) are continual companions of these women's lives. The characterization of these women was nuanced and refreshing: they are spiteful, cruel, caring, violent, calm; they explode into violence at slight provocations and mediate conflicts between others. I also enjoyed the ending of the novel, where with the sale of the house an era comes to an end, and the women who lived there are left displaced in a new, unrecognizable America.

The first three chapters of this book are near perfect. The last two, however, decline in quality. I struggled to relate to the lengthy musings on Christian Science that accompanied Aunt Grace's death. The last chapter also had a completely unnecessary scene where Gram visits the elderly mother of her African-American housekeeper (replete with slurs) that added nothing to the story: if intended to illustrate the casual racism of the rural whites described in the story, the racism would have already manifested in earlier portions of the narrative and would be deeply ingrained in their speech patterns and daily lives. As it is not, the scene feels shoe-horned in.

[Trina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got the sense reading the reviews of this newly-published novel from 1983 that this would be a bucolic coming-of-age story for 4 girls. Instead I think the description from a review at the time, "Norman Rockwell gone bad" is a more precise description. The men don't fare well here, and they don't have much part in the drama. On the other hand, the women (5 sisters and their mother) can change from loving to viperish as quickly as the daughters go from playing together to pulling each other's hair and fighting. The writing is richly descriptive, although I expected more "seasons on the farm." I found the book compulsively readable and finished it in two days. It's a very, very good novel--characters aren't likeable as much as believable. Chase has reconstructed an era, a place and a family, far from ideal, but hauntingly real.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no idea this book even existed. Reading it was like reading, I don't know, a mash-up of And Ladies Of The Club and My Antonia written in the 1st person plural by a group of kids. Unexpected and touching.

[Jane · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have to say this is the worst book I have ever read. It was a struggle to get through it. Take my advice and don't read it.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty slow-moving character study. I enjoyed it at first for the descriptive writing, but then it just got slow.

[Hester · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joan Chase does something unusual with the way she chooses to tell the story of a family living on the outskirts of a small town in rural Ohio after WW2. I think the grammatical term is first person plural . The " we " is the collective experience of the four granddaughters of a fierce matriarch , the titular Queen of Persia , who owns and rules the large house and small holding and is the complaining but vital hub of the family wheel .

Men are peripheral , whether it's her husband who exists in a world of sulking bitterness in the barn with the animals , the drinking Pan like figure of one husband who both loves and loathes his audience of sisters in law as he battles for the top spot but never wins or the kind but introverted son in law who works as a butcher and plays the trombone in the attic ..These men seem to come and go, their wings clipped or broken as their fledgling wives never entirely or willingly escape the nest.

The girls run wild , unsupervised and as indistinguishable from each other as a litter of fighting puppies . They fall , they break , they get up again . Only puberty steps in to determine difference and the beautiful eldest princess has many suitors , none of whom fool the queen .

There is no mama named and it takes a while to realise two of the five aunts are mothers to two siblings pairs The younger of one these two is probably the narrator but It's hard to know who is who among the girls as the POV shifts . This brings childhood in as a collective experience of "us" not "me" and family as extended not nuclear . Like the Greek chorus they witness the drama and uninhibited intimacy of family life and have to be content with their partial view , filtered through their own naive reasoning and the limited information or uninhibited outbursts from the adults . There's both plenty and sorrow , storms , showers and sunshine , abundance and dread as the outdoors is the ever captivating escape .

It's as much a statement of counter culture , of communal living , as any hippie cult or commune only here we have a gambling , savvy , tight-lipped Gran not a guru in command and faith is relegated to a necessary but not fully welcomed guest . The kingdom is all and the Queen will do as she wants . Capitalism is at the heart of the system , both the engine and the enemy of this oasis of tempered freedom as Gran , the hard headed Queen of the kingdom calls all the shots . One daughter has made a life away from this world, in advertising, in New York City and her seductive materialism laced with the modern faith of Christian Science acts as an alternative counterweight to Grans more hard core determinism . But change is not the enemy to Gran , only servitude which is the only gift men seem to offer . She embraces consumption and modernity but with one eye on the bottom line . There is no sentiment for the hard bitten past . In another world she could have been President and I get the feeling she would have been as ruthless and as successful as the best of them .

[Trisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1983 and winner of the PEN/Hemingway first novel prize in 1984, this is another example of why it’s worth tracking down books that ought to be better known than they are.

This one is noteworthy for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that it’s a fascinating portrait of a 1950’s era matriarchal multi-generational family of women who are managing quite well on their own without being dependent on husbands – as so many women of their generation were. In fact, if I have any criticism of this novel it’s that almost all the men who do show up in the narrative are either drunk and abusive, lazy and worthless, or devious and manipulative – sometimes all at the same time.

The one exception is Dan, the gentle but all too timid husband of one of the family’s five sisters who lives with his wife Libby and their daughters Jenny and Celia in the rambling 9 bedroom farmhouse belonging to his mother-in-law the feisty old matriarch he refers to as the “Queen of Persia.” The other sisters, Grace, Rachel, Eleanor and May come and go, along with Rachel’s daughters Anne and Kate, and the novel provides a fascinating glimpse into their lives, each chapter unfolding from a different point of view.

Joan Chase has created a cast of unforgettable characters who are anything but stereotypes and whose back stories make for fascinating reading. Chase tells their stories by moving back and forth in time to reveal more and more about each of the sisters and the fierce love that binds them together despite their often volatile relationships.

I was especially intrigued with the novel’s structure which utilizes the somewhat rare 1st person plural voice of the narrator – who isn’t just one narrator, but rather all four of the cousins speaking as “we” rather than a single “I.”

Despite being written nearly four decades ago, this extremely readable novel has a contemporary feel to it – possibly because it deals with timeless themes that always make for compelling reading – the consequences of bad choices, the strength of family loyalty, and the power of resilient women.

[Edward Champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Move over, Joshua Ferris. Here's something meatier and far more interesting. When THEN WE CAME TO THE END came out in 2005, I did not like it. I saw through the stylistic use of first person plural and realized that Ferris ultimately had nothing to say about existence (or even office existence: the recent TV series SEVERANCE is far more smarter in any given five minutes than Ferris was in his entire novel). And by publicly calling out this novel's deficiencies, by not recognizing Joshua Ferris as a "genius," I apparently ruffled some feathers. Ferris's editor went well out of her way to blacklist me with that publishing house. And it took me years for them to finally come around to me. Now I've seen just how well the late and underrated Joan Chase uses first person plural to unpack some often disturbing family dynamics and I realize that I made the right call. Are we detached when it comes to the forced togetherness of family? And how much does this get in the way when it comes to real meat and potatoes issues like loss, grief, illness. That seems to be the overarching conceptual idea of this novel, which also contains some coruscating prose. Joan Chase deserves a lot more love, folks. She really showed what could be done with the first person plural far more inventively than Ferris.

[Maxime]

This is one of the books I am always reading. I finish it and it circulates on the nightstand, in to my purse, lies beneath the couch and no sooner has it attracted some dust bunnies then I’m wiping it off and starting all over. Nate gave me his copy long ago, that hot little pint sized moody son of a gun.

Multigenerational female bonds that I never had. A beautiful midwestern backdrop I’ve never visited. A matriarch named after the homeland of Love. Reflections of masculine anger we have all seen.

A beautiful portrait.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mysterious and beautiful. The story of four young girl cousins being raised by their grandmother and a rotating series of aunts in rural Ohio, this novel is told in the first person plural. The young cousins share their collective coming of age through a series of challenges and many losses. As they become women, they look to their mothers and grandmothers to see what kind of women they will be. We as readers only have access to what they narrators understand at the time (though it is not hard to fill in the blanks). Note: The weird title is a little offputting. The "Queen of Persia" is a nickname for the girls' tough-as-nails grandmother, who owns the big house where they all live and plays bingo every night, even the night her daughter is diagnosed with cancer.

[Bronwyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was really beautiful but almost haunting. It’s almost more a series of vignettes in the life of this family. The narration as a foursome of cousins was really interesting to read but really leant some depth to the storytelling - everyone is connected to everyone in all these different ways. I really enjoyed this. Yet another great NYRB Classics title.

[Elizabeth Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I loved the use of the choral narration (we) representative of the four granddaughter characters.
Gram is a fantastic character, and the rest are excellent as well.
This one is a balanced mixture of the beautiful and the bleak, with a heavy dose of dark humor sprinkled throughout.

[Catie]

Recommendation from @booksnourish_caroleann - June 2018