Madame Zee by Pearl Luke
Fiction Saturday, July 17th, 2010
It begins with a strange tightness in her chest, followed by a vision. A boy she doesn’t recognize. A man falling through ice. Images of someone who has already passed. And finally the serene face of Honora, her deceased sister.
From the earliest moments of her childhood, Mabel Rowbotham knows that she is different. She is struck by visions and premonitions that disturb her dreams, haunt her waking hours and stay with her long after she emigrates from her English home to the Canadian Prairies. Although she desperately wants to understand these powerful episodes, Mabel tries to hide her gift behind a normal life, a normal job and a normal marriage.
But Mabel is not destined to be normal. Her desire to understand herself and her place in the world leads her into the arms of the Brother, XII—founder of a Utopian Spiritualist colony on the eastern shores of Vancouver Island. It is here that Mabel fully transforms into the complicated and enigmatic figure of Madame Zee. Amidst upheaval and strife, she ultimately finds a sense of self—and an explanation for the mysterious knowledge that has shaped her life.
Pearl Luke, prize-winning author of Burning Ground, has drawn on the extraordinary true story of Canada’s most infamous cult leader and his mistress to create a haunting and provocative novel that confronts one woman’s desire to truly know herself. Dark and searing, magical and evocative, Madame Zee is a brilliantly imagined portrait of a life that suggests another side to a woman whom history has repeatedly maligned.
Read an EXCERPT from Madame Zee
Short URL: http://www.bookclubbuddy.com/?p=249
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