The Whalebone Theatre

August 1, 2022
A profound sibling bond gets the Seagrave children through their dysfunctional childhood and shapes their experiences during World War II. Cristabel is 4 years old when her widowed father, Jasper Seagrave, remarries. The only redeeming thing about her stepmother, Rosalind, who clearly hates her off the bat, is the prospect that she might produce a brother. Instead, there's a sister, Flossie--but following her father's accidental death and the comfort offered Rosalind by his younger brother, there's a boy cousin, Digby, as well. The three children are raised together in the unusual household at Chilcombe, with Cristabel leading their adventures. These take an exciting turn in 1928, the year Cristabel turns 12, when a dead whale washes up on the beach. The household creates a proscenium stage using its bones, and she becomes the director of a quirky theater company that includes all the adults at Chilcombe, among them an avant-garde Russian painter and his girlfriends, Hilly and Philly. But the clock is ticking on this magical world. The war that begins just as the children enter adulthood sweeps them apart and turns Quinn's debut into what feels almost like a different book entirely, driven by fear and suspense rather than whimsy and humor, with scenes of espionage and violence careening toward what one suspects is inevitable tragedy. Which, to be fair, is exactly the sort of thing war does in real life. Told partly with letters, lists, and scrapbook cuttings, there's something old-fashioned about this novel, even in its handling of its stubborn, independent female lead, a Jo March type, if Jo March joined the British special forces and became a secret agent in France. This big, old-fashioned, seriocomic "crumbling estate" family saga works best before the war comes along.

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Starred review from August 29, 2022
The emotional upheaval of the interwar years in England is dramatized afresh in Quinn’s dazzling and imaginative debut. Cristabel Seagrave’s mother dies in childbirth, and Cristabel’s father, Jasper, who remarries when she is three, dies soon after. This leaves Cristabel to be raised by her disinterested stepmother, Rosalind, who then marries Cristabel’s aviation-obsessed uncle Willoughby, Jasper’s brother. In 1928, when Cristabel is 12, she discovers a dead whale washed up on the beach adjoining the decaying Seagrave estate. She turns the whale’s rib cage into the proscenium for a theatre, where she ambitiously stages The Iliad and The Tempest with the help of her half sister Flossie, cousin Digby, loyal kitchen maid Maudie Kitkat, and Taras Kovalsky, a Russian artist. Fourteen years later, Cristabel and Digby’s experiences at playacting will come in handy when they are both parachuted into France on separate espionage missions to help the Resistance during WWII. But will they survive to see the renaissance of the Whalebone Theatre? Thorny, idiosyncratic Cristabel is a formidable first among equals in this expansive cast of memorable eccentrics. Peacetime whimsy gracefully segues into scenes of unbearable tension and heart-wrenching suspense as Cristabel boldly infiltrates Paris on the eve of its liberation. Combining elements of I Capture the Castle, Brideshead Revisited, and Charlotte Gray, this is a reading experience to be long cherished. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc.

Starred review from October 15, 2022
Cristabel Seagrave enjoys an extraordinary childhood on her family's ancestral estate in coastal Devon, England, after World War I. Running free while largely ignored by adults, she passes her days in fanciful ways, once constructing a chariot out of a wheelbarrow and two croquet mallets. All she knows of the world she has learned from books, and she is infatuated with Homer. Her mother died at Cristabel's birth, but her father remarried and had another daughter, Flossie, before he died. After Cristabel's stepmother remarried, she gave birth to Digby. Cristabel, Flossie, and Digby form a wild band of little pirates, joined by the children of a Russian artist who Cristabel thinks may be Poseidon. They create a theater out of the salvaged ribs of a beached whale and stage The Iliad in spectacular fashion, followed by a few Shakespearean plays, earning some notoriety in the process. By WWII, the whale bones frame a victory garden, and Cristabel and Digby find themselves working as undercover agents in Nazi-occupied France, dangerously acting out new roles. The narrative turns dark and suspenseful under the author's expert direction. In an astonishing debut, Quinn creates an enchanting world and a cast of thoroughly endearing characters whom readers will be sorry to leave behind. This genre-blending delight will draw fans of Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures and Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs novels.

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