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Summary
Summary
Minerva, Minnesota, in 1923 is the picture of Willa Cather-like gentility: the Northern Pacific Railway runs through a town center dominated by church steeples and the Hamilton Creamery and Pop Factory. But Minerva is also a small town of limited opportunity, a place where the status quo is firmly entrenched and rigidly enforced. Against this tableau of midwestern placidity and calm, three Minerva women assert their dignity and independence against all odds.
The troubled relationship between young Penny and her mother, Barbara, is getting worse. Disturbed by her mother's affair with the man they clean house for, Penny answers an ad to work for Cora Egan, a Chicago society woman who has fled a bad marriage and intends to raise her child alone on her grandfather's farm. Cora's situation shocks the town, but over time her presence opens a door in Penny's and Barbara's lives. Through these women, Mary Sharratt considers what it takes to reinventthe self, to claim one's true identity.
Mary Sharratt's first novel, Summit Avenue, was hailed as a "remarkablel debut . . . [that] weaves dark, evocative fairy tales and passionate longings into an incandescent coming-of-age story" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Readers interested in feminine archetypes and women in myth will be similarly drawn to Sharratt's newest novel. Exquisite historical detail and emotional resonance infuseThe Real Minerva,an old-fashioned story with a modern spirit.
Author Notes
MARY SHARRATT is an American writer who has lived in the Pendle region of Lancashire, England, for the past seven years. The author of the critically acclaimed novels Summit Avenue , The Real Minerva , and The Vanishing Point , Sharratt is also the coeditor of the subversive fiction anthology Bitch Lit , a celebration of female antiheroes, strong women who break all the rules.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This story of three women a mother, her daughter and the town pariah living in a Minnesota hamlet in 1923 is a heartfelt tale of female empowerment, hampered slightly by unnecessary exposition and a sometimes predictable plot. Fifteen-year-old Penny Niebeck is a curious, gentle girl living and working with her beautiful mother, Barbara, a cleaning woman for the privileged Hamilton family. Hardened by incest (of which Penny was the result), Barbara loves her daughter but is suspicious and cynical about human nature. She's also having an affair with Laurence Hamilton, a relationship that disgusts Penny. Meanwhile, Penny finds "the Maagdenbergh woman," whose real name is Cora Egan, fascinating. A moneyed socialite rumored to have fled Chicago and an abusive husband, Cora dresses like a man and runs her family farm on her own but she's pregnant and could use a hired hand. Following a quarrel with her mother, Penny runs to Cora's, arriving just in time to help her give birth to a baby girl. It's the beginning of a beautiful but deeply complicated friendship, as the women's relationships with their men take tragic turns. While Sharratt's (Summit Avenue) male characters are often leering and dangerous, her female characters emerge as convincingly ambivalent, yearning and sympathetic, and their emotionally satisfying, old-fashioned happy ending should be a crowd pleaser. Agent, Wendy Sherman. Author tour. (Sept. 22) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Set in small-town Minerva, Minnesota, in 1923, this novel is a paean to the bond between mothers and daughters, actual and otherwise. Fifteen-year-old Penny Niebeck, angry over her mother Barbara's affair with the man for whom she keeps house, takes off to become a hired girl herself for Cora Viney, who dresses in men's clothing and works her grandfather's farm alone while awaiting the birth of her child. Penny proves a lifesaver for Cora and newborn Phoebe, and her life is soon entwined with theirs until tragedy strikes at the farm and the Hamilton house. Both mothers have risen above being victimized by the men closest to them, Barbara raped by her father, who tried to drown newborn Penny, and Cora physically abused by her husband, a prominent doctor. Penny, the link between the two women, becomes both surrogate mother and daughter and is the key cause of the seemingly inevitable violent event that will shape her life. Having woven fairytales into Summit Avenue (2000), Sharratt now threads The Odyssey through this engrossing tale. --Michele Leber Copyright 2004 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Second-novelist Sharratt (Summit Avenue, 2000) celebrates female grit as her three spirited protagonists challenge with courage--and a little firepower--the men and the society that wronged them. The setting is 1920s Minnesota, where the characters are as shadeless as the prairies that stretch to the horizon beyond the small town of Minerva. Thirty-year-old Barbara Niebeck keeps house for the Hammond family, and she's taken her 15-year-old daughter Penny out of school to help with the work. Bright and ambitious Penny resents being deprived of an education almost as much as she does her mother's affair with Mr. Hammond, whose wife has been in a coma for four years. (Barbara has never told Penny that her grandfather is also her dad and tried to drown her at birth, so she doesn't understand what her mother is up against.) When Barbara slaps Penny for criticizing her behavior, the girl runs away. Seeing an advertisement for a hired hand, Penny heads out to the Maagdenburgh farm to find the owner hemorrhaging badly after childbirth. She calls a doctor, cleans up the baby, and soon learns that Cora, a former socialite who dresses up as a man, has fled an abusive marriage and is terrified that husband Adam will come for her. Inspired by her new employer, Penny studies to become a nurse, cares for baby Phoebe, helps around the house, and learns to handle a gun. When Adam shows up, she acts to protect Cora, who then decides to flee to Mexico. Barbara is also in trouble, wounded by Hammond's deranged daughter Irene, who also shoots her father. But this is a story about survival, so the three women must be tough and resilient enough to move on. Shucking off their notoriety, they head for new destinations where more manageable challenges await them. Sort of tough women doing really tough stuff in a marshmallow sort of a story. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Minerva, 1923The day before the heat wave began, Penny Niebeck cleaned Irene Hamiltons room. Stooping to her knees, she picked the strewn stockings and underwear off the floor, and the dress that had been worn only once since its last washing and was now crumpled and stained. She was stuffing it all into the laundry bag when Irene marched in, pale and plump, white-gloved hands clenched. Penny struggled to her feet and steeled herself, sweat beading under her armpits as she met Irenes colorless eyes. Irenes hot breath, smelling of breakfast bacon, fanned Pennys cheeks. Both girls were fifteen, their birthdays five days apart. For the past eight years, Pennys mother had worked as the Hamiltons cleaning woman. For almost as long as she could remember, Penny had clothed herself in whatever Irene had worn out and cast away. "You want to know something?" Irene let out a swift exhalation that lifted the hairs on the back of Pennys neck. "Your mother named you Penny because shes cheap, and so are you." Penny took a step backward, nearly stumbling over the laundry bag. "You have to go catch your train," she said. Irene and her sisters were leaving for summer camp that day. "Doesnt it leave at noon?" A glance at the porcelain-faced clock on the dresser told her that it was nearly half past eleven. "I forgot something." Irene turned to snatch her mothers photograph from the lace-topped vanity and clutched it to her chest, her arms carefully folded around it. The photograph had been taken before Mrs. Hamilton fell ill from the sleeping sickness. For the past four years, Mrs. H. had been an invalid in the Sandborn Nursing Home. Her face was frozen up like a statues. She didnt talk anymore, didnt do anything but sleep and let the nurses feed and change her like a baby. The doctors couldnt say how long she would live or if she would ever get better. "You know why Daddys sending us away." Irene spoke accusingly. Penny breathed hard. "No, I dont." But her voice faltered and blood began to pound at her temples. "You know." Irene spoke so vehemently that her spit landed on Pennys face. "Even someone as dumb as you could figure it out." "Im not dumb." "Oh, yeah? Then why arent you going to high school this fall?" Penny looked down at her cracked old shoes, the color of potatoes left to rot in the cellar. When she had finished ninth grade that spring, her mother had told her it was time to leave school and earn her own keep. High school was for people from well-off families or children whose parents cared about education and that sort of thing. At fifteen, Penny had hands already as swollen and red from all the cleaning as her mothers were. "Your mothers too cheap to keep you in school," Irene said, sticking her face into Pennys so that she couldnt look away. "Shes as cheap as they come." "Is that so?" Penny shot back. "Well, your father seems to think shes just fine." She watched Irenes face go from flour white to chicken Excerpted from The Real Minerva: A Novel by Mary Sharratt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
