🎹 Notes for September 4 meeting ♬ ♭ ♮ ♩ ♪ ♫

tamisutcliffe
Sep 5, 2020
2 min read

Greetings, First Friday Book Club members:

Our next (live!) meeting will be Friday, September 4th at 2pm at the McKinney National Airport

[1500 E. Industrial Blvd. McKinney, TX 75069]

Our reading for September is The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

The Queen of the Night is now in it's 9th printing.
Full of melodramatic flourishes that hint at plot twists and poetic passages about music, one of the most unusual aspects is the first-person narrator; not once in more than 500 pages are quotation marks used for the many scenes and conversations.
The novel’s title takes on multiple meanings over the course of the story, including a role in an opera which is so difficult that it might break her voice and the position of a prostitute as explained by the madam.

American-born Lilliet Berne (pronounced LILL-ee-yay Burn-NAY) - "is the most famous soprano in the French opera. She is offered the role of a lifetime: an original part written for her. But then she sees that the opera must be based on a part of her life she's kept under wraps. Who would so precisely, exquisitely and cruelly use her past against her? Her journey to discover that propels a story of the Second French Empire featuring a number of characters also drawn from history."

Detailed review in Opera News:
Author bio: Alexander Chee
6 Stranger-Than-Fiction Events that Inspired Alexander Chee [article]
Blackstone (the audiobook publisher) has a free 30 minute excerpt online, featuring the soprano Lisa Flanagan, who the author chose as the voice of the audiobook.
[Transcript] NPR interview (six minutes) with the author from January 2016
[Photos] 6 Fashion Takeaways from The Queen of the Night