Queen Esther
A novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Indigo’s Best Books of 2025
After forty years, John Irving returns to the world of his bestselling classic novel and Academy Award winner The Cider House Rules, revisiting the orphanage in St. Cloud's, Maine, where Dr. Larch takes in Esther, a three-year-old Jew whose life is shaped by anti-Semitism.
Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board a ship from Bremerhaven to Portland, Maine, and anti-Semites murder her mother in Portland. In St. Cloud’s, it’s clear to Dr. Larch, the orphanage physician and director, that the abandoned child not only knows she’s Jewish, but she’s familiar with the biblical Queen Esther she was named for. Dr. Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther, he doubts he'll find any family to adopt her.
When Esther is fourteen, soon to become a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows, a philanthropic family with a history of providing for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they detest anti-Semitism and similar prejudice. Esther’s gratitude to the Winslows is unending. As she retraces her steps to her birth city, Esther keeps loving and protecting the Winslows—even in Vienna.
The final chapter of this historical novel is set in Jerusalem in 1981, when Esther is seventy-six.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Irving revisits the setting of The Cider House Rules with a baggy novel about a Viennese Jewish orphan and her adoptive family in New Hampshire. Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905 and loses her father to pneumonia during the family's passage across the Atlantic when she is two. She and her mother, Hanna, settle in Portland, Maine, where Hanna is killed by an antisemite when Esther is three. Esther then winds up in the orphanage run by Dr. Wilbur Larch, a character from Cider House, before she's adopted as a teen by the tolerant and patrician Thomas Winslow and his wife. In the late 1930s, Esther travels to Jerusalem and aids a Zionist paramilitary group. After Israel's independence in 1948, she becomes involved with the Israeli Defense Forces and engages in heroic exploits well into her 70s. Long stretches of the novel are devoted to her biological son, Jimmy, who is raised by Thomas's daughter, and grows up to become a novelist. It's tough to find a clear through line, and Irving sidetracks the proceedings for extended digressions into the history of circumcision and other matters. There's fun to be had in his bawdy wordplay, however, as when Jimmy, visiting Thomas in the hospital after a stroke, misunderstands a nurse's use of the word "labile" and "imagine his unfortunate grandfather as emotionally vaginal." Unfortunately, such moments are too few and far between to save this jumbled tale.
