Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Angel and Apostle by Deborah Noyes


Angel and Apostle: a novel by Deborah Noyes. Denver: Unbridled Books, 2005.

Love and lust, beauty and depravity Angels and Apostle has it all in a mix of marvelous complexities. Progressing at a deliberate pace we are with Pearl as she grows from childhood to adulthood. Because of the historical and sociological insights we empathize with our young, spirited outsider.

Our Pearl is the daughter of Hester Prynne, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s unfortunate victim of Puritan society in his work The Scarlet Letter. Noyes begins her novel with Hester in the stocks and Pearl wanting desperately to understand her place and relationship to those of her community.

We see those around her the intermingling of duplicity, jealousy, mockery, even hatred yet we also witness love, responsibility, and nobility of purpose. Adultery, the plague, squalor, and merriment at alehouses are all part of the seventeenth-century intercontinental tale along with the sweet duality of the verdant New Forest.