JEHANNE DARK, BOOK ONE

The Maid of Orleans rises from the trauma of war in Lombardi’s historical novel, the first in a series.

Domrémy, 1424: Most families have left this war-torn village, but not the Darcs, the wealthiest tenant farmers in the area. When English soldiers raid the town, the Darcs’ 12-year-old daughter Jehanne is brutally gang-raped. Afterward, she begins to experience otherworldly fits and visions: “Whispers fill her head, whispered voices of other girls, other boys, all pushed to the ground by soldiers and discarded in pieces. Some of the voices are not speaking French, the words thicker, more glottal, odd music of tones and angles.” After three years of these phenomena, the voices give her an assignment to join the army of the Dauphin—the heir to the throne—to help him unite all of France. Her relatives think Jehanne is mad. The girl was meant to be a nun, and the idea of her fighting in the army, much less turning the tide of the war, sounds ridiculous…at least until she reveals a supernatural ability to freeze enemy soldiers in their tracks. To serve the Dauphin, however, she will have to win over his mother-in-law, the so-called Queen of Jerusalem, Yolande of Aragon, who is a keen strategist in her own right. Together, they will try to halt the loss of French territory by lifting the English siege of Orleans. Lombardi’s interpretation of Jehanne captures both the surreality of religious mysticism and the madness-inducing violence of the period. Here, she describes a hallucinatory episode: “The braided voice loud now: screams within screams. Then: a waking dream blinds her, she can barely see the priests and lawyers in their nice robes. Instead: A lance crossing a chest, teasing under armor, then leaned into, until blood spurts. Dead eyes. A crossbow splits a liver.” Rooting Jehanne’s story in sexual trauma adds a disruptive dimension to this famous history, one that the reader will be intrigued to see developed in subsequent volumes.

A bold, lyrical reimagining of the Joan of Arc story.