When Ange St Loup is brought unconscious to the madhouse of the Amaranth, she is outlandishly dressed, covered with scorches from the building she burned and bruises from jumping out one of its windows, and her mouth is sewn shut. And that is all she knows. Even as her memory returns to her, and she begins to piece together the puzzle of her life as an actress in the theatre Lady Minerva, every answer only raises further questions, and at the heart of them remain the ones she has no answers for. Answers that might explain what she was doing in an alley, by night, outside a burning building, with her face mutilated and her mind in tatters. Which version of the story is the truth? Is it Ange's own, despite the amnesia that only gives back her past in fragments? Is it the madhouse warders', which paints Ange as a murderer, or the prioress's, which paints her as insane? Is it the one that returns to Ange piecemeal, over time, growing only more sinister as it inches toward completion? Or is the truth something more complex, more dangerous, than anything that Ange can even grasp?
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Kornher-Stace’s exceptionally well-crafted debut plays out in a byzantine milieu of madhouses and melodramatic theater in an unnamed seventeenth-century European metropolis. When a woman is found lying outside a burning building, her memory mislaid, and her lips sewn shut, her only recourse for shelter is the church-run Amaranth asylum. Protected from abusive wardens by a resourceful fellow inmate, she slowly recaptures her identity as Ange St. Loup, a rising actress in one of the city’s less-reputable theaters. As her life in the colorful Lady Minerva troupe comes back to her, however, Ange must grapple with the accusation that she is both insane and a murderess. Yet her greatest challenge awaits her in the person of Lady Minerva’s unseen puppet master, a shadowy criminal mastermind known only as the Specialist, who subtly manipulates Ange’s environment in a scheme bent on molding her into the city’s greatest actress. In richly textured, atmospheric prose, Kornher-Stace delivers a spellbinding tale of deception, betrayal, and the darker possibilities of playacting. --Carl Hays
Review
Kornher-Stace's exceptionally well-crafted debut plays out in a byzantine milieu of madhouses and melodramatic theater in an unnamed seventeenth-century European metropolis. When a woman is found lying outside a burning building, her memory mislaid, and her lips sewn shut, her only recourse for shelter is the church-run Amaranth asylum. Protected from abusive wardens by a resourceful fellow inmate, she slowly recaptures her identity as Ange St. Loup, a rising actress in one of the city's less-reputable theaters. As her life in the colorful Lady Minerva troupe comes back to her, however, Ange must grapple with the accusation that she is both insane and a murderess. Yet her greatest challenge awaits her in the person of Lady Minerva's unseen puppet master, a shadowy criminal mastermind known only as the Specialist, who subtly manipulates Ange's environment in a scheme bent on molding her into the city's greatest actress. In richly textured, atmospheric prose, Kornher-Stace delivers a spellbinding tale of deception, betrayal, and the darker possibilities of playacting. --Booklist, December 1, 2008
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More About the Author
Nicole Kornher-Stace's short fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Best American Fantasy, Clockwork Phoenix 3, Apex, and Fantasy Magazine. Her poem "The Changeling Always Wins" placed 2nd in the 2010 short form Rhysling Award, and her short fiction has been longlisted for the British Fantasy Awards and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of Desideria, Demon Lovers and Other Difficulties, and The Winter Triptych. She can be found online at www.nicolekornherstace.com or wirewalking.livejournal.com.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wondrous, evocative and unsettling,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Desideria (Paperback)
It's a story within a story about madness inside madness.
Kornher-Stace's ability with prose is beyond dispute; even early in the book where the slow pace and fairly standard madhouse setting made the reading slow, her turns of phrase and images will keep you going, if you're interested in craft and language effectively wielded. The fantastical aspects hover somewhere at the fringe. It is closer to magic realism and recalls Tanith Lee's THE SECRET BOOK OF PARADYS (particularly "The Book of the Mad"): a Paris-analogue city, an asylum, a touch of the Gothic, a protagonist who struggles to make out what is real and what's not. The novel divides itself into two worlds: that of the gray, dull haze of the madhouse Amaranth inhabited by brutish warders, nuns and ailing inmates--and the colorful, vivid world of the theater populated by exuberant, squabbling actors cavorting across the stage. It's easy to like the latter far more, but even the theater isn't free of undercurrents of strangeness and tension. The two halves are brought together within Ange's head and by the play "Desideria": a script that flickers in and out of existence, for it is written in a book that is supposed to be blank. The denouement and revelation of the plot are ambiguous and there's a few things about it that may disappoint, but overall DESIDERIA is an evocative and engaging experience.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Why it's worth buying,
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This review is from: Desideria (Paperback)
This is the book to read if you are looking for something unique. Too often fantasy novels fall into the same pattern of a chosen child, who grows up to fulfill an established, prophesied destiny. I hesitate to even label this novel as fantasy. It's a little bit horror. A little bit mystery. And being so, I can't compare it to anything else I've read.
Built as a story within a story, the writer weaves the tale of the girl, Ange, in a madhouse and her questionable madness, with the story of Ange's past before her captivity when she was an actress of mysterious talent. Embedded throughout the story is the play, Desideria, that acts as both Ange's damnation and salvation and the hinge on which the story comes together. It is certainly worth reading- especially for anyone that craves rich literary talent with the fantastic elements of speculative fiction. You'll find yourself hooked on each section of the story-immersed in the voice of the writer, her unique turns of phrase and the language of the characters.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
masterful debut,
By
This review is from: Desideria (Paperback)
"Desideria" is mesmerizing from the first page and once you get into its flow, a page turner to boot. It takes place in an unnamed provincial European city cca 18th century with a mixture of French and English names which is under the power of the rich "Governor" while the "Specialist" is sort of an underground boss that becomes the de-facto patron of smaller run-down theater Minerva.
This we figure out as the book progresses since the novel starts with a striking scene in which a girl looks into a mirror, throws a lamp in the small room and then when the building gets on fire jumps from a window to be later found unconscious and led to the city madhouse. "She swallows once and blinks caught light away. Then hauls the lamp back, torquing at the waist, and hurls it at the mirror, all her strength behind the throw. It shatters, they shatter, glass into glass, and the fire out onto the table, up into the air. Hard sparks of lamp, mirror, and flame fly winking out like fireflies. She stands there as the fire scales the walls, as the fire's scaled the walls, as the fire finds no higher purchase, dashes itself against the ceiling, hurtles raining down. Beneath the fall of fire, her eyes still and sharpen off . For the first time, they're aware." If these lines hook you as they hooked me, get the novel as soon as possible since it keeps this superb lyrical prose to the end, though there is lots of action and intrigue to come later. "Desideria" has a very intriguing premise: an actress who truly believes she is the character she plays - all actors have to believe that to some extent but for Ange it is *real* until she is led away from the props - and the execution alternating with surreal madhouse scenes that are as good as any such I've read is just perfect. There are two story lines: Annie/Ange in the madhouse and Ange St.Loup in the Minerva intertwine and later conflict so the question of what is "real" and what is imagined becomes more and more important as the book goes on. Split into named chapters alternating between the "present" when Ange has been taken to the madhouse and the past detailing her life as an actress in the theater, the novel features a lot of great characters, both in the theater troupe and in the asylum. All the actors, including the manager and his wife, the screen writers, the thief turned actor by necessity have very interesting detailed life stories, though as the novel progresses we are starting to wonder if they are real or a figment of Annie's imagination who believes herself being an actress when she is just a regular mental inmate. What about the madhouse and her brutal guards and strange inmates? And then there is the play of the title with a scenario that somehow materializes into Minerva and resembles what is to come... The resolution of the dual-storylines is excellent and the ending is great making this a debut to remember. Just unbelievably good!!
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