5/28/2023 0 Comments Queens by Michael Cunningham![]() ![]() The book moves in this mode throughout as it skips across a decade, the atmosphere magical, but gritty, like a modern-day fairy tale. Her entire inner life is a secret.Ĭunningham's opening set piece unfolds at night, snow tumbling through an open window in the apartment Barrett and Tyler and Beth share in Bushwick, Brooklyn. ![]() "The Snow Queen" moves in propulsive bursts, shifting from Barrett's to Tyler's to, briefly, Beth's point of view, showing how secrets, by their nature, metastasize and create alternate realities.īarrett doesn't tell his brother about his celestial revelation Tyler is hiding his cocaine use from both Beth and Barrett and Beth, so ill and frail, remains a mystery to everyone. Once a boy genius and wandering Yale graduate, he's eddied into a life of reduced expectations.Īs the book opens, Barrett works in retail and lives with his brother, Tyler, a struggling coke-addicted musician who is trying to compose a wedding song for his dying love, Beth.Ĭunningham has worked well with trios in previous novels, and he makes the most of this set up here. This spiritual revelation arrives in the nick of time for Barrett. As he imagined a whale might apprehend a swimmer, with a grave and regal and utterly unfrightened curiosity." But then he feels the sky looking at him. At first, he thinks it may just be an unusually southern display of the Northern lights. ![]()
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