Matrix

Matrix 

by Lauren Groff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease." --jacket copy

I have always been intrigued by Eleanor of Aquitaine (because of the Katharine Hepburn movie) and this book didn't focus on her as much as I expected it to. The focus was on Marie, who proved to be a fascinating person and I was quickly drawn into her world. She was dropped into a place in life that was not at all what she wanted and part of the strength of this novel was watching her come to terms with this truth. 

The focus on the inner lives of this group of religious women in an isolated place reminded me of Black Narcissus; the time period and the geography in the two novels is very different though.

This book counts toward the 2022 Historical Reading Challenge.

Review: Fates and Furies

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.” 

The characters in this novel were horrible people in many ways (most ways perhaps) but there was something compelling about them that made me unable to look away. I loved the way the novel was structured. We had the whole story from Lott's point of view then the second half moved forward in time but showed us what was going on behind what we had seen before. (It reminded me of Sondheim's Into the Woods.)