The Next Queen of Heaven-Gregory Maguire

The Next Queen of Heaven
Gregory Maguire
Harper, Oct 5 2010, $14.99
ISBN: 9780061997792

In 1999 in Upstate New York, seventeen year old Tabitha Scales becomes the caretaker to her ultra religious mom Leontina after the latter takes a nasty blow to the head from a statue of the Virgin Mary. A highly pious Protestant who religiously attended the Cliffs of Zion Radiant Radical Pentecostal Fellowship, the three-time divorcee undergoes a radical personality change from someone who thought profanity was a sin to cursing out loud. She is a stranger in many ways to her frustrated daughter and her sons.

Catholic Church music director Jeremy Carr hopes his show in New York City will enable him to flee from Thebes and finally leave behind his beloved Willem Handelaers, who is married with children. Although gay, Jeremy Carr becomes friends with the nuns of Our Lady of the Sorrowful Mysteries monastery. At about the same time, Tabitha falls in love but the object of her affection loves another woman who sings in Carr’s Catholic Church choir.

As the millennium countdown occurs in this small town, religious fever is at a frenzied hight level that most people never see in their lifetime. Thus faith is bandied often with jocular pseudo babbling philosophy that makes St, Anselm’s proof of God seem more deductive valid than most of the cast, who rationalize their belief system to cover their behavior. Readers who relish something different will appreciate a visit to Thebes, New York at the end of days of the last millennium.

Harriet Klausner