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In Alice Elliott Dark’s second novel, “Fellowship Point,” Agnes Lee and Polly Wister have been friends for some 80 years. Their intertwined families own homes on a peninsula in Maine, and part of the book’s drama comes from their efforts to conserve the land and keep it out of the hands of developers.
“The issue of land, land tenure, land conservation has always interested me immensely,” Dark says in this week’s podcast. “I got to that pretty quickly when I was developing this story. I decided I wanted to write something like a 19th century novel, and I wanted it to be modern. In the 19th century, women didn’t own land. They didn’t take land decisions, even if they did own it, and it seemed to me a modern version of a great, older, 19th-century novel.
Katherine Chen visits the podcast to discuss her new novel “Joan,” in which Joan of Arc introduces herself as a born fighter who becomes an avenging warrior.
“I think the central image that keeps us fascinated with Joan of Arc all these years later is the mental image of a woman in armor on horseback going into battle,” Chen says. “I think that image keeps us captivated to this day because it’s as startling and surprising as it is empowering.” We also remain captivated, Chen says, by the “pure improbability” of Joan’s story.
Also in this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news of librarians caught up in the culture war over banned books; and Elisabeth Egan and MJ Franklin talk about what they’ve read. John Williams is the landlord.
Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We Read”:
We’d love to hear what you think about this episode, and about the Book Review podcast in general. You can send them to books.†