Set in the grotty upstate town of Thebes, The Next Queen of Heaven is a Christmas tale gone horribly wrong. Clocked by a Catholic statuette, Mrs. Leontina Scales starts speaking in tongues. Tabitha Scales and her brothers scheme to save their mother or surrender her to Jesus—whatever comes first. Meanwhile, choir director Jeremy Carr, caught between lust and ambition, fumbles his way toward Y2K.

this is one of the books offered by concordfreepress http://www.concordfreepress.com/
I'll release this book as a RABCK and ask whoever will get it to keep on the experiment of concordfreepress, make a donation, register that on their website and have the book travel on after reading
thank you!

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

hope you enjoy reading this book!

This wishlist book arrived in yesterday's mail. Thank you for sharing, Releanna! I'll head over to Concord Free Press shortly and take care of business over there.

I have enjoyed a couple of Gregory Maguire books (Mirror, Mirror and Son of a Witch) and slogged through a third (Wicked), so I wasn't quite sure what to expect with The Next Queen of Heaven. At first, I slogged. It took me several weeks to get in the right frame of mind to keep all the characters straight and care what they were doing. Once I got to know them, though, it didn't take me long at all to finish the story. I was amused at times, and confused at times, but I have a feeling this is a story I will find myself thinking about whenever I see a church choir, elderly nuns, or coffee creamer.

I'm taking this book to the 2011 BookCrossing Anniversary Convention in Washington, D.C., in April where it will (hopefully) find an eager new reader.

Adding to a book buffet at the 2011 BookCrossing Anniversary Convention!

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Tried hard to resist, in the last hours of the Convention, but this book looked too good to pass up. When I read grubsneerg's JE, I knew I had made the right decision, since I too liked Mirror Mirror a lot better than Wicked. Looking forward to this!

I have some mixed feelings about this. I was hoping for the imagination and elaborate details of Maguire's other books, based on children's stories, and this is quite different. I don't think the purpose was slapstick humor - the cover, and Maguire's style, argue against that. But parts of it were very funny (the nun who took a vow of deafness!). Is it maybe a satirical retelling of the traditional Christmas story, with the three musicians standing in for the three magi, etc? If it is, I didn't find the connections.

But I really liked the part at the back, about sharing a contribution to the community while sharing the book. I'll be taking this to a Get-Together with other Twin Cities BX'ers so I can point this out to anyone who seems interested.

Left on OBCZ shelves