Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

The Book of Joan: A Novel
The Book of Joan: A Novel
The Book of Joan: A Novel
Audiobook7 hours

The Book of Joan: A Novel

Written by Lidia Yuknavitch

Narrated by Xe Sands

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

3/5

()

About this audiobook

A New York Times Notable Book BuzzFeed 50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read this Year New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice National Bestseller

“Brilliant and incendiary.” — Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times Book Review

"Stunning. . . . Yuknavitch understands that our collective narrative can either destroy or redeem us, and the outcome depends not just on who’s telling it, but also on who’s listening.” — O, The Oprah Magazine

“[A] searing fusion of literary fiction and reimagined history and science-fiction thriller and eco-fantasy.” — NPR Books

The bestselling author of The Small Backs of Children offers a vision of our near-extinction and a heroine—a reimagined Joan of Arc—poised to save a world ravaged by war, violence, and greed, and forever change history

In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.

Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one—not the rebels, Jean de Men, or even Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.

A riveting tale of destruction and love found in the direst of places—even at the extreme end of post-human experience—Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan raises questions about what it means to be human, the fluidity of sex and gender, and the role of art as a means for survival.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateApr 18, 2017
ISBN9780062659941
Author

Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and three books of short stories. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she also teaches Women's Studies, Film Studies, Writing, and Literature. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.

More audiobooks from Lidia Yuknavitch

Related to The Book of Joan

Related audiobooks

Dystopian For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for The Book of Joan

Rating: 3.2430555555555554 out of 5 stars
3/5

144 ratings14 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is more than a sci-fi or magical realism novel. It is a wondrous and dark novel that questions the very foundations of our conception of society and what is progressive. I really enjoyed this, the descriptions are lucid and evocative, strange and galling and yet the darkness is brilliantly tempered with flashes of light and hope. I really recommend this audio book.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    No grotesque transphobia at the end or overwrought prose pls
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Joan of Arc Reimagined

    The Hundreds Years’ War, a conflict between a French faction supported by England and the House of Valois, was notable for its length, spanning generations, for the scorched earth tactics employed by the Burgundians/English, and for the myth arising around a young child savior, Joan of Arc. In Lidia Yuknavitch’s dystopian novel, Joan finds herself resurrected in the person of a girl who rather than deriving her powers from religious visions obtains them as a result of her oneness with dirt, that is the Earth, encompassing all its powers of creation.

    In the beginning, Joan misuses her power as she wages a war of total destruction again an evil, insane, charismatic Jean de Men. As the mythic Joan fell into the hands of Burgundians, so Jean de Men captures Joan. Similar to Joan of Arc, de Men puts her on a showy trial and executes her by fire at the stake. The result, of course, is the opposite of his intension and Joan becomes both legend and hope encapsulated in a book engraved by electrocautery on the skin of Christine Pizan. Christine knows a secret, that Joan did not perish, and it’s Christine’s mission to defeat de Men and allow Joan to use her powers of fecundity to restore the world, much as it was those supporting Joan of Arc to use her to produce an independent France.

    Yuknavitch conjures some pretty striking images, particularly of Jean de Men’s domaine, a suborbital city, CIEL, in the sky populated by a class of horribly mutated humans, white hairless beings devoid of sexuality, unable to reproduce themselves, who exit to exit, and who scribe their existence on their skin and skin graphs that hang from them like robes. CIEL hovers above a burned over world, one denuded of vegetation, a ball of brown dirt. Underneath that bare surface, ragtag groups of survivors exist, many of them awaiting a savior they know will return with the power to make things whole again.

    Now, to enjoy Yuknavitch’s novel, readers have to put logic aside, because her world is quite fantastical. It defies logic, much in the way destroying your own planet by polluting it and ravaging it with wars does, and by restricting, subjugating, and punishing those who give and nurture life does. In this regard, Yuknavitch makes a dramatic point. Unfortunately, if things get too out of hand, too much like she envisions here, there will be no savior at the ready to put things right again, at least not for millions of years.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Reminded me a bit of Kameron Hurley's short story "The Corpse Archives". Very good ~literary~ sci-fi. Good timing with the Handmaid's Tale miniseries releasing in March and probably an upswing in readership for this kind of thing.

    All that said, I did like it!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Intense, a brutal space opera. Like having a violent, spectacular dream about humanity teetering on the bloody brink of its exile from Earth and ultimate demise. While the author's vision is spectacular, I most appreciated the main characters, wacky yet also ruthlessly determined to win or die, and their love for each other.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Strong stuff! Not for the faint of heart, but it's as amazing and fresh as N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, which for me is high praise indeed. I especially admire the economical (and often poetic) prose that serves to build a world, flesh out characters (!), and propel an ambitious/fascinating/timely plot. Many "literary novels" can't do this at twice the length and still remain relevant to an early 21st-century reader. I plan to let this one simmer subconsciously for a few weeks, and then read it again. I've already checked out several of the author's other works from the library, in anticipation of more brilliant, well-crafted prose.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I'm sitting on my review of this book because I'm still processing my thoughts. Every attempt I make at categorizing this book seems to fall short of what it actually is. (This is probably for the better.) I actually encourage you to read other reviews. This book deserves conversation, possibly more than it requires reading it. As heretical as it feels to say it, this could make a truly terrifying, dynamic TV mini-series.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The earth is dead, populated only by a few dying survivors, the environment reduced to desert. A handful of wealthy people live in a space station tethered to the earth, called CIEL, using the last few resources to live increasingly futile lives. The sudden, dramatic environmental changes as well as the new living conditions have brought changes to the people on CIEL; they are hairless, devoid of pigmentation or genitalia. Without the usual physical markers, people have turned to grafts and scarification to ornament themselves. Christine is one of CIEL's residents. She made her name for her skill in creating elaborate stories on people's bodies. More and more, her mind is on Joan, the young woman who led the armies opposing CIEL's dictator, Jean de Men, and who was burned to death in a public display. There are whispers that Joan isn't dead after all and that rebellion might be possible.I read the first four chapters and then wondered if I'd be able to read the entire book. Christine and her soulmate show their independence by pantomiming sex acts and shouting out Shakespearian-style insults. When they're imprisoned for this, Christine bravely rebels by miming masturbation. I was left wondering if I could find it in myself to be interested in people who, in the face of great evil, reacted by being naughty. The book did improve once the story turned toward earth and to what led to its desolation. There were some fantastically inventive ideas in this book, which in the end were able to pull me through, although they were certainly not enough to make me like The Book of Joan. Primarily, there were two aspects of the book I struggled with. One is that any event that occurred in the novel was slowed down so that the author could point out how Christine and/or Joan felt and how they felt their feeling really, really deeply, perhaps more intensely than any other person has ever felt a feeling. And the other thing was that this book had so many extra words in it. But her beloved's voice -- Trinculo's -- it is in her. His voice so rings Christine's corpus that she feels she might faint. Every bone in her body vibrates with his language.It's not a long book, but there's not a simply described scene in it. And while neither of those qualities is a flaw, they are things that I find annoying. I'll chalk my dislike of this book up to personal taste, while recognizing that many of the ideas put forward were thought-provoking and impressive.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a story of a future geocataclysmal event. The earth is dying. People of the ruling class have gathered pieces of space junk to build a sustainable living environment, CIEL, which hovers over earth and is ruled by a demented leader. Over the years the people aboard have devolved. They've lost their hair, their gender, their complexion. Long story short, it's not good, it's not healthy. The meek who have remained on earth are not well either and the young warrior, Joan, (loosely based on Joan of Arc) who inspired rebels to fight for freedom is trying to survive, just like the people in CIEL. Christine, living on CIEL and once a follower of their demented leader now despises him with as deep a passion as Joan. Somehow, these two ladies must unite to bring down this tyrant and mend what there is left of humanity. Wow, this novel covers a lot of new age thinking. It's mother earth, it's love, it's creation, destruction, energy, it's "cosmic harmonies made of strings". It's "Everything is matter. Everything is moved by and through energy". It's different.The author chose a prose that is raw and nasty but for some reason urged me on to the seismic climax. If you choose to read this one, prepare yourself for something mind blowing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book was excruciating, and not in a good way. I never manage to become pleased to be reading it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Will be thinking about this one for awhile.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a strange little book where the world has been racked by environmental factors and war. A small colony of privilege human beings are living in space; they are led by a corrupted leader and there are horrifying rules to live by. Resources are scare and life is a living hell. Joan is a mythical person who was on the other side, a rebel, who was supposedly executed years before; however she was not. It was a difficult book to get into as the first 50 pages really did not make a lot of sense. However it was worth the slog through the book and once I got to the end I immediately reread the book and the whole thing made sense.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Book of Joan starts off as one of the most prophetic, imaginative, and thought-provoking novels of the social media era. It ends far away, a genre-bending, weird thriller that at least remains thought provoking. Throughout it all, the language is rich and the story is compelling. Although the incongruous final acts managed to alienate me as a reader, I was pulled in for so much of the story and enjoyed the experience.A reimagining of sorts of Joan of Arc, The Book of Joan is a dystopian tale of what happens when a madman becomes the world's most powerful leader. As decisions to plunder the world for a profit turn disastrous, the earth chooses a hero, Joan. Really, does this future seem so far fetched? And do these characters' reflections on the dictator Jean de Men sound the least bit foreign?...he overtook lives, his performances increasingly more violent in form. His is a journey from opportunistic showman, to worshiped celebrity, to billionaire, to fascistic power monger. What was left? When the Wars broke out, his transformation to sadistic military leader came as no surprise.We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power.And again:If we look at history—those of us who study it, who can remember it—we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we'll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It's as if humans can't understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.In the first two parts of the novel, this is the story we get. It is a constant condemnation of many things, including commonly held notions of power, sexuality, and art, all told in vividly stunning passages. In this future, humans have begun a process of de-evolution. As humanity veers toward extinction, many of the remaining asexual population have become hypersexualized. They seek to recreate themselves through intricate grafts. Through two-thirds of this novel, the story is language driven, and characters and plot are merely devices to give body to the words. This is the creation story in reverse as told through the intricate weaving of words.In the final part of The Book of Joan, the story got a bit messy for me, as I'm sure it will with many readers not so accustomed to hard sci-fi. The action is turned up and the threads become so knotted with one another and with techno-babble that it's difficult to discern what is going on. Add to that the final scenes, where oddity becomes normality and a particular plot device I've never been a fan of makes an appearance. The big revelation is that a character (who in this review shall remain unnamed) is not who they have purported to be. The mask is removed and we're all suppose to gasp. Personally, I've never seen this done well in any novel and my reaction is to throw the book across the room.What would've been a solid review for this novel was hurt some by this conclusion. What drew me into this book originally was the nearness of the events and the construction of language, but as everything drifted from what was familiar, I myself became untethered. And though I recognize that the story ends with the same strong commentary on power, sexuality, and art that it began with, it was a commentary addressed to a much different audience.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    this is a wonderful book, very well reviewed and for good reason. it reminded me of the handmaids tale. the same rich new writing