Daughters of Chaos
Set in Nashville during the Civil War, this work of magical realism (or “a braided alternate history,” as the author calls it) combines myth, magic, and feminism into an original adventure. The main character, Sylvie, introduces herself to the reader in a diary written in 1877 in Monterey, California, just after the death of her lover Hannah. She sets down her life history for her twin daughters, given up for adoption to a local family fourteen years before. How they came into the world is a fantastical tale that involves Sylvie’s coming of age among actors, revolutionaries, sex workers, and other awe-inspiring goddesses.
Educated as a translator, Sylvie follows her older sister Marina to Nashville to live among the ladies of the Land of the Sirens, an elegant brothel that is much more than it seems. The Civil War is raging, and Sylvie learns quickly that the women she lives among are loyal to neither the Union nor the Confederacy, but rather to the long-term goal of ending the patriarchal control that is the source of all war. They serve the ancient Goddess known as Artemis, Astarte, Isis, and many other names, chiefly by acting as chaos agents disrupting the machinery of commerce and war.
Sylvie has been called by Marina’s priestesses to translate a lost manuscript by Aristophanes: an alternate version of Lysistrata titled Apocrypha, which details the Goddess’s first attempt to win converts to Chaos. If all this sounds complicated and far-fetched, it is, but Sylvie’s voice is matter-of-fact and emotionally authentic. One has to admire the erudition of the novel even if the plot never quite makes sense: Fawkes lyrically weaves historical threads ranging from the Ancient Greeks to Renaissance Venice to 19th-century America into a theme that insists on the primal power of women acting in service to the planet rather than to men.
