- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Canada (Feb 14 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0140290923
- ISBN-13: 978-0140290929
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #799,343 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Kim Echlin's second novel, Dagmar's Daughter, draws on ancient Sumerian and Greek myths to tell a tale of three generations of women on a tiny, remote, and fictional island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, off Canada's East Coast. Norea, the oldest of the three, escapes the crushing poverty of her native Ireland by stealing her mother's boots from her coffin just before burial and hopping a boat to Canada. Dagmar, her daughter, has strange powers to influence the weather and grow plants. She falls in love with a charming rogue named Colin who fathers a son and a daughter. The girl, named Nyssa, grows up to be a talented fiddle player and gets involved with an older musician who had once loved her mother. Nyssa also pursues her dangerous fascination with the island's oddest character, Moll, a self-mutilating crone who harbours mysterious powers of healing and destruction.
Moll's mythic function in the novel feels a bit forced, and the author's relentlessly poetic prose can become exhausting at times. But there is a brilliantly heightened sense of craft, story, and setting reminiscent of another wondrously sharp and strange East Coast novel called The Shipping News. Ultimately, Echlin's sensitively wrought tale of women struggling to own both their passion and their bodies is a rich and rewarding read. --Nigel Hunt
Book Description
Dagmar's Daughter follows three generations of passionate and powerful women.
Norea Nolan emerges from the destitute Irish village of her upbringing by stealing the boots from her mother's coffin, walking to Dublin, and stowing herself on a ship bound for a remote island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Norea's daughter, Dagmar, is born with an uncanny ability to control the weather and a remarkable gift for gardening. As she develops into a striking woman she is wooed and won by Colin Cane, a musician who loves her fiercely, but is unfaithful.
Dagmar's daughter Nyssa is as musically brilliant as her father and as struck with wanderlust. She runs off with one of her father's oldest friends, a musician who has returned to the island after a long self-imposed exile, and loses herself in his dark world. Dagmar is undone by her daughter's disappearance and her wrath invokes an icy rain, which envelops the landscape in a thick layer of ice.
Mystical, seductive, and brimming with music and magic, Dagmar's Daughter draws upon the ancient myths of Inanna, conqueror of the underworld, and Demeter's search for Persephone, her lost daughter.
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