This historical novel intertwines the lives of the Bible's Queen Esther, a senator's wife in the 1970s, and a Brooklyn mother in 2016, whose stories trace surprising parallels across centuries.
...engrossing, highly readable, darkly sexy ... [a] transporting novel ... Solomon is a truth teller. Her observations of domestic life — rote marital sex, the steady drip of compromise, the sine wave of intimacy and irritation — are unfailingly sharp ... The Book of V. is a meditation on female power and powerlessness, the stories told about women and the ones we tell about and to ourselves.
...irresistible, sexy and intelligent ...When I was growing up, the Purim pageant play felt lacking in nuance... In her imaginative and fiercely feminist retelling, Solomon offers much greater complexity ... Solomon’s novel spans generations, stretching millennia to weave three vibrant and transporting tales from the fabric of a biblical past ... Like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours whose triptych structure Solomon credits, the novel skillfully mines the domestic sphere (of parties, sewing circles, hidden gatherings of kept virgins) for its kinetic inner life ... Solomon’s previous novels...lay the foundation for this multifaceted masterwork, which extends the scope of her sensibility over a larger landscape. Her gorgeous, lilting prose vibrates with fight, destabilizing patriarchal norms with questions of power and want, identity and self-determination to timeless and timely results ... Like Mrs. Dalloway to The Hours, the biblical echoes throughout offer a sort of treasure hunt gratification, but the novel succeeds on its own. As with the best of desert island (or pandemic) reads, The Book of V radiates a dynamism that invites rereads and generously keeps giving — challenging and arousing us as it delights.
Each [protagonist] takes up roughly equal space in Anna Solomon’s deftly interwoven round-robin of a novel, their stories both compulsively readable and thrumming with deeper cultural themes ... it’s [Lily's] frank, self-deprecating voice that often anchors Book of V. as it toggles back and forth through time ... Much like Michael Cunningham did in The Hours, though, Solomon...has the gift of making you sad to leave each protagonist as her respective chapters end, before plunging happily into the next. Like Cunningham, too, she manages a great novelistic trick: blending real history and radical fiction into one enthralling whole.
