In his new historical novel, Queen Esther, acclaimed author John Irving returns to the New England setting of St. Cloud’s Orphanage of his 1999 classic, The Cider House Rules. Readers of Irving’s previous work will find familiar characters as well as new ones: the Winslow family and Esther Nacht.
A Jewish orphan who grows up at St. Cloud’s, Esther is adopted at fourteen years old to be a nanny for Honor, the youngest Winslow daughter. When Esther was a child, her family fled Vienna to escape antisemitism, and her mother was subsequently murdered by antisemites in the United States. In the Winslow family, Esther finds a safe, nourishing haven; and in Honor, she finds a lifelong confidant and coconspirator. The two make a pact: when the time is right, Esther will have a child and Honor will raise it.
Throughout this insightful and humorous novel, Irving examines the relationships that bind people together – be they made of blood, devotion, or love. Esther’s choices are guided by her Jewish sense of duty and a strong devotion to Israel. Always feeling that she has to catch up on her youth spent away from her Jewish culture, she embodies her namesake, the biblical Queen Esther, a force working to protect Jews.
Esther’s biological son, James (“Jimmy”) Winslow, is shaped by his drive to be a writer; he sees the world through narrative and is constantly searching for his place in the story. Raised as non-Jewish by Honor and his doting grandparents, he must untangle for himself what his own connection is to his biological mother and, ultimately, what Judaism is to him.
When Jimmy is in college, he chooses to study abroad in Esther’s native city. Experiencing the apathy and neglect of his Viennese host family’s life, which contrasts sharply with his own nurturing, open-minded upbringing in New Hampshire, Jimmy understands more about how families can be constructed and protection offered to those who need it. Through his two fellow foreign students staying with him in Vienna, Jimmy has the opportunity to make decisions about who he himself would like to be in a found family.
Again and again, Jimmy is confronted by choices that test tradition — from the streets of Vienna crawling with ghosts of the past and agents of espionage intent on shaping the future, to the white clapboard houses of his small hometown in New Hampshire where minds and opinions change slowly — he wades through the desires of those around him to find the life that feels authentic and fulfilling to him.
Queen Esther is richly textured with unforgettable characters, vivid settings, and familial love that will stay with you long after you put the book down.
Simona is the Jewish Book Council’s managing editor of digital content and marketing. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a concentration in English and History and studied abroad in India and England. Prior to the JBC she worked at Oxford University Press. Her writing has been featured in Lilith, The Normal School, Digging through the Fat, and other publications. She holds an MFA in fiction from The New School.
