The Book of Joan

February 20, 2017
The future of life on a barren, ravaged Earth is in the hands of a new Joan of Arc in Yuknavitch’s (The Small Backs of Children) muddled novel. After the Wars that battered Earth, the wealthy have withdrawn to CIEL, a floating space platform that’s “far enough from the sun to exist,” but constantly in danger of incineration. Short of resources, CIEL is far from heavenly: its citizens no longer have the ability to procreate, all mention of sex and sexuality is criminal, and nobody is allowed to live past 50. The main art form on CIEL is grafting: burning or otherwise altering the skin. Nearing her final, 50th birthday, the master graft artist Christine begins to burn the outlawed story of Joan on her body. Joan was a child warrior whose great power came from her connection to the natural world. After setting off all Earth’s volcanoes, Joan was publicly executed by Jean de Men—who becomes the despotic ruler of CIEL—but rumors of her death may have been exaggerated. And as Christine and her lifelong friend Trinculo begin to plot a revolt against de Men, an opposition also begins to gather strength on the surface. Intent on finding a language for the body, Yuknavitch attempts to draw on nature writing, gender studies, and the theater, but these strains are poorly synthesized and result in a sloppy and confusing text; readers may struggle to figure out just what Joan’s powers are and how she came by them, for instance. The novel is most memorable from a thematic standpoint, particularly its insistence that “the body is a real place. A territory as vast as Earth.”

February 1, 2017
A retelling of the Joan of Arc story set in a terrifying near future of environmental and political chaos.Earth in 2049 is ravaged. A geocatastrophe has swallowed coasts and islands; supervolcanoes and solar storms have dimmed the sun and reduced the planet to "a dirt clod, floating in space." The wealthiest of Earth's inhabitants now live in CIEL, "a suborbital complex" floating just in view of their former planetary home. Christine Pizan (a nod to medieval court writer Christine de Pisan), at age 49, resembles the other inhabitants of CIEL: physically androgynous, completely white "like the albumen of an egg," and covered in scars and skin grafts. These deliberate body modifications, or "skinstories," are Christine's expertise, and they are some of the only reminders she has left of life on Earth, along with her beloved friend and fellow CIELian Trinculo (who resembles his buffoonish namesake from Shakespeare's The Tempest). In particular, Christine has seared into her body the story of Joan, a young eco-terrorist from the time of the geocatastrophe--and when her and Trinculo's survival is threatened, she turns to her body's offering of Joan's tale for inspiration. Yuknavitch (The Small Backs of Children, 2015, etc.) writes with her characteristic fusion of poetic precision and barbed ferocity, and the ingenuity of the world she creates astounds even in the face of the novel's ambitiously messy sprawl. Perhaps even more astounding is Yuknavitch's prescience: readers will be familiar with the figure of Jean de Men, a celebrity-turned-drone-wielding-dictator who first presided over the Wars on Earth and now lords over CIEL, having substituted "all gods, all ethics, and all science with the power of representation, a notion born on Earth, evolved through media and technology." A harrowing and timely entry into the canon of speculative fiction.

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November 15, 2016
A ferocious, gorgeously written statement of art's powers and dangers in a violent world, Yuknavitch's The Small Backs of Children remains one of my favorite books of 2015. Her new title, featuring humans living on a platform floating above a radioactive Earth, is a futuristic retelling of Joan of Arc's story. With a 25,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.