The Colorado Springs Gazette final

Author’s debut an epic delight

BY MALCOLM FORBES Minneapolis Star Tribune

One stormy night in March 1928, 12-year-old Cristabel Seagrave ventures out of Chilcombe, her family’s Dorset manor, and discovers a dead whale washed up on the beach. The next morning, she shows it to her half-sister Flossie and cousin Digby, who are equally awestruck.

The three children devise plans to examine and exhibit the creature. Cristabel comes up with the bolder, more unconventional idea of building an open-air theater from the whale’s ribcage.

This outlandish proposal becomes a reality. The creative children, who act out scenes with sock puppets against cardboard backdrops in their attic, are soon performing in amateur productions of “The Iliad” and “The Tempest” in their Whalebone Theatre.

They are not alone on their stage. Cristabel enlists the help of everyone on the Chilcombe estate, from her aloof stepmother Rosalind, to inquisitive kitchen maid Maudie, to Russian artist Taras and his bohemian entourage.

The ragbag theater company wows the public and the press throughout the 1930s. But then war breaks out, disrupting the lives of everyone at Chilcombe.

Cristabel’s playacting skills are tested when she is recruited as an undercover agent and parachuted into occupied France to help Resistance fighters. But during a debrief, she learns Digby, on a separate secret mission, is missing. Can she track him down while trying to evade capture and stay alive?

Most first novels that clock in at nearly 600 pages smack of self-indulgence on the author’s part and prove a slog for the reader. In contrast, Joanna Quinn’s epic debut is an immersive, capacious delight.

Quinn takes a risk by serving up two markedly different halves — the first mapping an idiosyncratic childhood, the second chronicling wartime danger and adventure. But Cristabel provides the necessary link. We champion her as she makes the transition from young imaginative girl to gutsy indomitable heroine.

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2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.gazette.com/article/286620356295668

The Gazette, Colorado Springs