A Severed Wasp

The continuation of her novel "The Small Rain" with Katherine Forrester, now Madame Vigneras. This story is told in flashback form about her years after returning to Paris and Justin Vigneras to continue her music studies. Detailed writing with historical references - profound, happy and heartrending - at times I cried. I know I will reread these books again.

I read many of the other reviews of this book and it appears that people are trying to compare it to her other books. This book cannot be compared to A Wrinkle In Time, it's a whole different kind of story.

Satisfying! A novel of unceremonious surprises, saying what it needs to say without saying every little thing. I should have figured it would be about so much more than Madame Vigneras's "retirement." I'd been waiting to read it ever since I read The Small Rain, and it was quite worth the wait. It hit me as a lover of literature, an artist, and a writer.

I think I have finished my last book for 2023: A Severed Wasp by Madeleine L.Engle. The book tells the story of Katherine Forrester, now Madame Vigneras, who is in her 70s, still performing and looking back on her life. She has returned to New York after living in Paris after the war. I read the first book--The Small Rain earlier this year--where we meet Katherine as a child just coming into her own as a pianist, taking after her famous mother. I enjoyed the first book but the second one was remarkable with interwoven stories that lead to a shocking twist that ties them together at the end.

This book is concerned with the unreasonableness of love, and how love transforms. The characters are deep, complex and self-aware, for the most part. One complaint I have is that L'Engle has some gay characters in this book, but it's clear that she just doesn't *get* it.

This is a sequel to one of her earliest novels, [b:The Small Rain|251947|The Small Rain (Vigneras, #1)|Madeleine L'Engle|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173150818s/251947.jpg|449236], and reading them one after the other brings a few things about L'Engle into sharp focus. The foremost is how much she grew as a writer in the years between these books. It's also clear that she stayed true to her central message, that love in all its facets is the engine which powers show more the universe. It's a message I embrace.

There's a scary undercurrent to this novel, set in a grim and nearly lawless New York. It's a morally complex, challenging novel, and I enjoyed it mightily. show less

I have always loved this book even though it is far more adult and dark than her other works. It is interesting to see how she ties this story back to one of her YA novels plus it mentions my all time favorite L'Engle character the heroine from And Both Were Young.

The book was slow to get me interested, but by the end I could not put it down. The characters were well developed that I felt comfortable with them and did not want to see them go. (Even if I didn't like a bunch of them!) I would recommend this book.

Katherine Forrester Vigneras, in a continuation of her story from The Small Rain, returns to new York City from Europe to retire. Now in her seventies, she encounters an old friend from her Greenwich Village days who, it turns out, is the former Bishop of New York. He asks Katherine to give a benefit concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This leads to new demands on her resources—human, artistic, psychological, and spiritual—that are entirely unexpected.