Joan

by Freeman Ng

After a hundred years of war,
with France on the brink of destruction...


Saint Margaret of Antioch is returned to the earth to aid Joan of Arc in the liberation of her homeland, but what can she do when Heaven itself seems to be conspiring to send Joan to the Fire?


“An intimate meditation, textured and ingenious...we see Joan as part of something endless - and troubling, yes - but also exuberant and, finally, mysteriously, larger than one life and most certainly larger than one death.”


- Tim Wynne-Jones, author of Blink & Caution,
winner of the 2011 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award


“Despite the unusual narration, Ng manages to draw readers to Joan's side during her tribulations, and he creates sympathetic characters in both Joan and Margaret...An engrossing religious and historical account that would make a valuable companion to a high school history unit on Joan of Arc.”


- Kirkus Reviews

Genres: Historical Fiction

ebook

First published July 21, 2014

About the author

Freeman Ng is a former Google software engineer and the author of Bridge Across the Sky , a YA verse novel based on the Chinese immigration experience through Angel Island in the early 1900s (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2024); Basho’s Haiku Journeys , a haiku picture book (Stone Bridge Press, 2021); The House We Sheltered In and The Masks We Wore , a pandemic picture book; Haiku Diem , a daily haiku feed; and Trumpbert , a political webcomic. He’s also the creator and illustrator of The Shape a Wing Makes , selected poems of Fran Claggett-Holland paired with Freeman’s digital art, and the co-author, with Peter Dale Scott, of Poetry and Terror: Politics and Poetics in Coming to Jakarta , a discussion of Scott’s seminal book-length poem that combined autobiography with an exposé of the 1965 Indonesian Massacre (Bloomsbury USA, 2019). Ripples, a picture book about gravitational waves and friendship written by Freeman and illustrated by Daniel Miyares, is forthcoming from Neal Porter Books in Fall 2027.

Reviews

[Carrie Marshall (Kellenberger) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the story of Joan of Arc and looked forward to reading Joan as it was referred to me by a friend.

I think that Ng's writing is good. Some of his passages are very beautiful, but the perspective he writes from is very unusual for a book and it threw me off consistently in each chapter. It's an unusual perspective to write from in a book. For this reason, it lessened my reading experience and I found it difficult to follow because of the POV.

There are many promising passages in the book and I'm sure Freeman Ng's next novel will be good. He is a talented writer. I just wouldn't recommend writing a book from the perspective he's taken in his novel.