Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2018
384 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises - and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself.
In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad - long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter - grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny's wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile husband.
Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage.
Set in the seething political climate of a contentious election,Thisbe Nissen's new novel is sexy, smart, and razor-sharp - a freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart.
"With humor, grace, and honesty, Nissen's three heroines ride an emotional roller coaster as they reconcile their respective pasts, ride out a turbulent present, and, hopefully, secure a more serene future." - Booklist
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"Investigating dysfunction and cynicism with humor, Nissen (Osprey Island) writes a descriptive novel filled with vulnerable and complicated characters who are often all too human." - Library Journal
"Thisbe Nissen's Our Lady of the Prairie is a Midwestern fever dream, a bold and ambitious look into the roiling emotions of a woman caught between should and could, between I must and I want. I found it funny, angry, hopeful, heartfelt, and above all, honest: about marriage, family, and that old-fashioned, endlessly fascinating thing called desire." - Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End and The Dinner Party
"I've been a Thisbe Nissen fan since page one of The Good People of New York. And now, loyalty rewarded! Our Lady of the Prairie delivers this wonderful author's characteristic wit, layered with delicious dysfunction, - poignancy, and heart." - Elinor Lipman, author of On Turpentine Lane
"Our Lady of the Prairie is a tumultuous romp, both cautionary and liberating. A mystery winds its way through these pages, as Thisbe Nissen explores marriage, lust, midlife crises and motherhood, crafting complex portraits not only of her characters but also of the land they inhabit; and, one thing is clear, this novel was written in praise of the prairie itself." - Julianna Baggott, author of Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders
This information about Our Lady of the Prairie was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Thisbe Nissen is the author of a story collection, Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night, and two novels, The Good People of New York and Osprey Island. Her fiction has been published in the Iowa Review and the American Scholar, among others, and her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, and elsewhere. She teaches at Western Michigan University and lives in Battle Creek, Michigan with her husband, writer Jay Baron Nicorvo, and their son.
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