The Real Minerva
A Novel
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4.8 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A “memorable [and] entertaining” novel of three strong women in 1920s small-town Minnesota by the author of Revelations (The Washington Post Book World).
Winner of the Willa Literary Award
Finalist for the Minnesota Book Award
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, setting into motion events that will change multiple lives. Drawing on her mother’s and grandmother’s stories of Minnesota farm life in the early twentieth century, acclaimed author Mary Sharratt has created a suspenseful and moving novel about the strength of women and the unexpected friendships that form between them.
“A paean to the bond between mothers and daughters . . . engrossing.” —Booklist
“Wonderful.” —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times-bestselling author of With or Without You
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.
