Angel and Apostle
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
At the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, we know that Pearl, the elf-child daughter of Hester Prynne, is somewhere in Europe, comfortable, well set, a mother herself now. But it could not have been easy for her to arrive at such a place, when she begins life as the bastard child of a woman publicly humiliated, again and again, in an unrelentingly judgmental Puritan world.
With a brilliant and authentic sense of that time and place, Deborah Noyes envisions the path Pearl takes to make herself whole and to carve her place in the New World. Beautifully written with boundless compassion, Angel and Apostle is a heart-rending and imaginative debut in which Noyes masterfully makes Hawthorne’s character her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A is for ardent, avid, adoring and such is Pearl, whose coming-of-age as Hester Prynne's bastard child is the subject of Noyes's debut. A reimagining of The Scarlet Letter's characters, Noyes's drama unravels the puzzles of "heart and history that consumed" impish Pearl, taunted by puritanical "cretins" as the devil's spawn. While Hawthorne's Pearl serves his novel primarily as a symbol of innocence, provoking contemplation of morality and social organization in his adult characters, Noyes, a young adult writer with a penchant for the historical and gothic (Gothic!: Ten Original Dark Tales), writes a Pearl of flesh and wit, who both dotes upon her stoic mother and despises her for their status as pariahs. As a child, Pearl's feminist musings frame the narrative: "Why did God hate the apple so?" Not until she leaves the New World and grows into womanhood does she feel the legacy of the scarlet A. Pearl settles in England and marries the brother of her sole childhood friend, Simon. But it is Simon, blind and sullen, who sees Pearl for who she is. Noyes engages with atmospheric charms of time and place, and though the major turns of the novel are predictable, she delivers an ending revelation that would surprise Hawthorne himself.
