Our Lady of the Prairie

September 1, 2017

Author of a John Simmons Short Fiction Award winner and two praised novels, Nissen surfaces after more than a decade with Phillipa Maakestad, a theater professor who enjoyed a passionate affair while teaching away from home for a semester. Havoc descends when she returns for her daughter's wedding. With a 40,000-copy first printing; a seven-city tour.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 16, 2017
Nissen (Out of the Girls’ Room and Into the Night) relies too heavily on authorial gymnastics in her latest, which explores what happens in middle-aged theater professor Phillipa Maakestad’s life after she falls in love and decides to blow up her marriage. The tornado that subsequently roars through town and disrupts the wedding of her emotionally fragile daughter, Ginny, at the once-Catholic Our Lady of the Prairie Church is a metaphor for the ensuing emotional chaos. Phillipa’s attempts to reclaim control—allowing her husband to spank her, handling her daughter’s hostility about the affair—are less than successful. Meanwhile, she becomes obsessed with proving that her belligerent European mother-in-law collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, and her decision to volunteer for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential run is a dramatic distraction she does not need. Nissen excels at capturing her protagonist as a woman on the edge—the elation, the sex, the emotional roller coaster, the questionable choices. But the mother-in-law subplot is too much for the narrative to support. It affords Nissen the chance to spin a self-contained, creative, and ironic 58-page fantasy, but Phillipa’s fixation remains nebulous. Is it a diversionary tactic against the circus her life has become, or a sign that she has lost touch with the people around her? This big question mark overshadows the book’s other elements, resulting in an intriguing yet uneven story.

November 1, 2017
Against the backdrop of the Bush-Kerry election, an Iowa Democrat has a midlife crisis that gives the tornadoes that rip through the state a run for their money.The timing of Phillipa Maakestad's decision to tell her husband about her passionate affair is unfortunate--the two theater professors are due to play parents of the bride at their daughter Ginny's wedding to a wonderful Amish boy. The responsibility is torqued by the facts that his parents, who were close friends of Phillipa's, were killed when an SUV hit their buggy and raising Ginny has been like a scene out of The Exorcist. Bulimic, addicted, promiscuous, filled with rage--Ginny has touched all the bases. After they get through the (literal) tornado that strikes the wedding, the Ginny problem is finally solved, though not for long. And by then, Phillipa herself has gone off the rails, living in a cheap motel, phoning in her classes, and freaking out about the election. If the author did not intend the Bush-era political ravings to be alienating, she overshot the mark. "Passing the monstrous W barn on 26, I wanted to drive up onto the grass, get out of my car, and hammer on the door, shouting 'How do you live with yourselves? Why not put up an I'm a Greedy Bigot sign?'" Then, after a flash of self-awareness (I sound like Ginny! she thinks), she returns to form. "The miserable world into which I brought my own miserable child, now a miserable adult, fully aware and sickened to the marrow of her bones by the injustice of this godforsaken place, and as wholly incapable as her pathetic mother to do a goddamn thing about it. About anything. How does anyone with a conscience...do anything but cry, all day every day, navigating this godforsaken world." This sort of thing, combined with random classist comments--on the baby of a woman she drives to the polls: "Travis: a name destined for the meth den"--seems designed to make the reader hate liberals. Throw in church-sign puns and musicals you can't get out of your head and a whole mininovel about Nazis in France...whew.At first, Nissen's narrator (Osprey Island, 2004, etc.) seems clever and voluble, so daring with her spanking-scene opener, but eventually she wears a bit thin.

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