Queen Lear (King Penguin) - Softcover

At Deer Forest, an opulent but decaying estate in early twentieth-century Ireland, eight-year-old Nicandra wants only to love and be loved. Named after her father's favorite horse, she doesn't even try to win the love of this tiny, dandy man who can only really love his animals. To earn Maman's love is her fondest wish, a dream fed by rare but ever-so-lovely moments of tenderness. Aunt Tossie's fawning affections are too available for Nicandra to value. Nicandra's growing up is stewarded by Aunt Tossie who is obsessed with Nicandra's chances of finding a suitable husband: "The list of sons of the right sort, still available in this country, was miserably short in comparison with that of the golden lads who had come to dust in Flanders and other places." When Nicandra does find a husband, she finds that love - the ways she has learned to know it - is indeed blind. Enmeshed in dying customs that demand thorough disregard for the humanity of servants and shop-keepers, Nicandra remains oblivious to the dangers facing her from those whose feelings she has trampled over as if they were part of the Irish landscape. Through penetrating and witty observation, sympathetic reflection, and a masterfully suspenseful plot, Queen Lear proves itself a shockingly good read. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen

In this sad, moving, and rather shocking novel, Irish writer Keane evokes in careful detail a lost world--that of a well-to-do Anglo-Irish family in southern Ireland in the period between two world wars, their main interests hunting and breeding race horses. The tragic theme is "the revenge life takes on those who please and give too much." From childhood to maturity, the sensitive and loving heroine, Nicandra, suffers a series of terrible betrayals. Like Shakespeare's King Lear (to whom she is implicitly compared in the title), she loses everything that is most dear to her. Her mother deserts her, she loses her baby, and her husband runs off with her best friend. At the end, in another echo of King Lear , happiness is momentarily restored only to be instantly snatched away. Not for the tender-minded.
- Bryan Aubrey, Fairfield, Ia.
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