The Next Queen of Heaven (2009)

I have read some good things about mr. Maguire and he has been recommended to me a couple of times, but I don't really see what is so great about him. I was really irritated with the constant inane chatter the characters keep indulging in. It seems as if they are uncapable of stringing together a coherent sentence of more than five words and when they do it is just to say very little interresting about nothing at all. The actions all seem quite random and whatever is supposed to be so very funny completely escapes me. Mind you, there are some bits I smiled at a little, but it was never a terrifying, thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime adventure as the book cover promised. I was disappointed to say the least. I tried and failed, guess we weren't meant to be! ( )

I love Gregory Maguire's adult fairy tale stories, but this is something very different. It is a magical fiction story set in upstate New York in the 1990s and follows an incredibly dysfunctional family through its single-mother's descent into craziness after a statue of the Virgin Mary falls on her head. While the events are difficult to believe, and the characters are completely over-the-top, Maguire uses the events to present some interesting and funny bits about the clash of cultures between Evangelicals, gays, Catholics and small town folk trying to live a "normal" life. Maguire nicely captures the awful period in the HIV epidemic before drug therapy reached its current ability to help people lead life with a chronic rather than fatal disease with a good subplot involving three gay men. A good beach read, but I like the usual Maguire stuff better. ( )

The Next Queen of Heaven is a departure from the normal Gregory Maguire tale. There are no fairy tales retold or mythic beings. It's life at its messiest and how people deal with it which makes for an interesting journey. ( )

Normally, Maguire writes about characters in such a way that I feel I know them and if I met them on the streets,I could recognize them. In The Next Queent of Heaven, he only accomplishes this for one or two of his characters. Most of them, I didn't understand, empathize with, or relate to at all. This book seemed to lack his normal wimsy and humor, not to mention his ability to take a story and turn it on its head. It looked like an interesting experiment on his part, but I hope he sticks to his forte from now on. ( )