The Real Minerva [Paperback]

Mary Sharratt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 13, 2006

Stunningly detailed, richly plotted, and emotionally engrossing, The Real Minerva is the story of three women forging their own paths in a Midwestern farming community. In 1923, as book-loving Penny enters adolescence, her mother, Barbara, pulls her out of school to send her to work. Destined to become a cleaning woman like her mother, Penny sees no escape from her bleak existence until a scandalous figure arrives in the town of Minerva, Minnesota: Cora, very pregnant, very headstrong, and very alone, has come to make a home on her grandfather's farm. Intrigued by this curious new resident, Penny sets out to work for Cora. Suspenseful and moving,The Real Minerva is a remarkable novel about the strength of women and the unexpected bonds that form between them.

Mary Sharratt is the author of the much-acclaimed debut, Summit Avenue, and the forthcoming novel The Vanishing Point. A born-and-bred Minnesotan, Sharratt drew on her mother’s and grandmother’s stories of Minnesota farm life in the early twentieth century for The Real Minerva. She now lives in Lancashire, England.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

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 © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (January 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618618880
• ISBN-13: 978-0618618880
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #917,715 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mary Sharratt is an American writer living in the Pendle region of Lancashire, Northern England. Her new novel DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL tells the vivid and wrenching story of a family caught in the Pendle witch-hunt of 1612. Her inspiration for the book arose directly from the wild, brooding landscape: the true story of the Pendle Witches unfolded almost literally in her backyard.

The author of the critically acclaimed novels SUMMIT AVENUE, THE REAL MINERVA, and THE VANISHING POINT, Sharratt is also coeditor of the subversive fiction anthology BITCH LIT, a celebration of female antiheroes, strong women who break all the rules.

She is currently at work on a new novel on the life of 12th mystic and polymath, Hildegard von Bingen.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written, quietly suspenseful novel, August 28, 2004

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Real Minerva: A Novel (Hardcover)

Life in 1920's Minerva, Minnesota--the fictional town in which the action of Mary Sharratt's The Real Minerva unfolds--is hard on those who are not fortune's favorites. Teen-aged girls mooning over matinee idols turn quickly into hardened farm wives with work-ravaged hands and too many children. But more onerous than the simple demands of survival in a difficult environment are the constraints imposed by the small town's repressive society, whose members abhor and squelch diversity and police behavior with vicious gossip and shaming. The three women on whom Sharratt's quietly suspenseful novel focuses are each eager to be free of the confinements imposed on them from without, to shed their identities and become reborn, to have possibilities open before them. Of the three, former Chicago society matron Cora Egan has largely succeeded in shedding her past by the time the novel begins. Having fled, pregnant, from her abusive husband, Cora settled on her grandfather's farm, which she now operates by herself, doing men's work while dressed in men's clothing. Since she has elected to live outside the roles prescribed by society for women, Cora is despised and feared in Minerva--a situation which has the potential to make her life not only lonely but dangerous. Cora is joined on the farm eventually by fifteen-year-old Penny Niebeck, who is herself fleeing the shameful behavior of her mother--an affair with a married man--which threatens to render them both outcasts. Together Cora and Penny raise Cora's infant daughter, working hard but happily--an idyllic period that readers will constantly sense is threatened by the potential re-appearance of the baby's abusive father.

Mary Sharratt's novel is about repression and rebirth and heroism, about the difficulty of simple living in early 20th-century, rural America, about the relationship between parents and children and the nearly insuperable obstacles that can rise up between people incapable of communicating. And it is about how a life's course can be altered irrevocably by a handful of choices. Despite the weight of the book's subject matter and the casual cruelty and violence it depicts (but does not wallow in), the story Sharratt tells is ultimately uplifting. Her heroines persevere and finally survive, scarred but strengthened by adversity, adopting in their different ways the strategies exemplified by the characters of Athena (whose Roman counterpart, Minerva, lends her name to the characters' home town) and Penelope in Homer's Odyssey. (Throughout much of The Real Minerva Penny is in the course of reading the epic, and Sharratt weaves the stories of Athena and Penelope lightly into her narrative. My one complaint about Sharratt's novel is that her Odyssean references sometimes struck me as forced.) The Real Minerva is a rich, beautifully written novel, and it is highly recommended.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb novel in the finest-kind category, August 27, 2004

By 

KatPanama "katpanama" (Readerville) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Real Minerva: A Novel (Hardcover)

I read this novel in a single afternoon, utterly paralyzed by the consuming story. It's a wonderfully satisfying novel, descriptively rich but spare of conventional sentiment whilst achieving a holistic view. If you liked Kent Haruf's "Plainsong," then you are certain to be mesmerized by Sharratt's "The Real Minerva." And, if you hated the Haruf, you still should read the Sharratt.

Life in small-town in Minnesota was, of course, surfeit with gossip, hidden drama and repressed sensibilities. Sharratt's novel captures all of this but rather more in their grandure than their conventional tawdriness. Minerva is the most alive small town I know -- fictional or otherwise. The protagonists in this book will win your heart but not through cheap sentiment.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Real Book, for Real Readers, October 26, 2004

By 

Diorama (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Real Minerva: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Real Minerva is just that--a real book. Not pretentious, not attempting to ride the trends, not obsessed with overblown language solely for the glory of its author. Not an unreadable creation for people who want to impress their peers by waving around a copy of the latest, hot-for-no-good-reason literary novel.

It is, instead, a story as unforgettable as any fairy tale we heard as children, peopled with characters who not only come immediately to life--they come to live with you. It is a lovely, satisfying story which reminds us that suspense--wanting to know what happens next and being unable to put down the book--doesn't depend upon noisy, gimics.

Mary Sharratt's voice is uniquely her own, yet her work resonates with the marvelously old-fashioned quality of good storytelling. There is not a wasted word here, and you'll find yourself rereading passages, not because you didn't understand, but because the language is so lovely, in such an understated way--like a perfect little black dress.

Don't miss this one!