Chen, author of 'Joan: A Novel of Joan of Arc' (Penguin Random House, 2022). Eastern, for a special 2022 History Book Festival author presentation, via Zoom, featuring Katherine J. Chen has summoned up just the Joan of Arc that this anxious, repressive age demands, even if her hope is not easily summoned.Please join us on Wednesday, November 2, at 5:00 p.m. Instead, female physical power-undiluted by piety or conventional feminine attractiveness-is celebrated here. Chen’s Joan, unlike so many of her fictional and cinematic predecessors, is no gamine, no little Maid of Orléans. Novels that try to get inside historical figures we can’t ever know are most illuminating for what they say about their own moments. Chen is equally skilled at charting how Joan’s sanctified reputation grows. Chen is adept at describing physical violence this wrist-breaking episode prefigures the breathless battle scenes to come. As any chronicler of Joan of Arc must be, Ms. Chen’s vision of Joan drives this historical novel. Chen retrieves the worn fragments of Joan of Arc’s story and assembles them into a narrative that’s eerie, austere and just this side of plausible.To do so is no small feat. It may not be the most nuanced portrayal, but if every generation gets the Joan it deserves, ours could do worse than an ass-kicking, avenging angel fighting simply for the right to fight. The closest Chen’s Joan gets to reverie is the epilogue, when - captured, caged and headed for certain death - she seems more Mel Gibson than Ingrid Bergman. And to make Joan less mystic makes her less interesting. To replace her inexplicable nature with a revenge plot is reductive.

The Joan of history is fascinating because she is enigmatic. by trading religious romanticism for the romanticism of war (especially as depicted by popular fiction), something profound gets lost. The usual tale of visions and visitations is portrayed here as merely a feature of the time. Her Joan is just plain tougher than all those knights and noblemen, a born fighter who, as a child, recreates Agincourt with rocks, gets a bull’s-eye with her very first attempt at a longbow and is a preternatural genius at military planning. Chen takes a lively stab, imagining the illiterate teenager as an abused child who uses her anger (and a remarkable tolerance for pain) to become an avenging warrior.

Joan book by chen