RaveThe Boston Globe\"Groff’s book cleverly extends beyond the written past to imagine other possibilities and to challenge the traditional record ... Groff takes seriously the history with which she engages along with the process of how that history was made—and by whom ... wickedly fun \'slashing\' is exactly what Groff is doing, adding women into the story, queering the text, and capturing a fuller range of human experience through such amendments ... Groff’s worldbuilding offers a sweeping backdrop of crusades, plagues, religious visions, and social stratification to inform this tale of women’s resistance, desire, and power ... Marie’s vexed relationship with Eleanor, the Queen of England, becomes a major structural parallel. These two seemingly different women both gain power and yet are still contained by patriarchal authority—one in a convent, the other at times in a prison—adding further literary panache to this entertaining tale ... By utilizing the margins of history to depict the disempowered and forgotten, she writes a creative, intelligent work that will last.
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