Publisher's Weekly:

"That crossbow could not silence the voice of God!" declares young Jehanne Darc, the "peasant girl in boy-doublet" of 15th-century France whose visions, piety, and leadership changed the course of history. Lombardi (author of blue: season, among other titles) brings that history to urgent life in this fascinating, at times harrowing look at the life of the epochal seer and soldier, from a horrifying rape by English soldiers at age 12 to her triumphant victory in the siege of Orléans at 17 years old. With intense focus, Lombardi interrogates and illuminates the mind of this girl "crawling home from the sheep meadow onto a horse and into white armor," facing uncertainty over whether "the jammed voices filling her ears" are "not madness but God."

Lombardi dramatizes events and complex states of mind with such swift richness that readers will feel fully immersed in the life of this saint-to-be, a young woman whose bold proclamations-those moments when "her angels push through her tongue"-can shock even herself. The host of characters can become a blur: kings, commanders of armies, casualties of war both on and off the battlefields, and the angels who seem to guide her from her home to Orléans just five years later. But all have a purpose in guiding her ... Lombardi excels at concrete detail of the horrors of war ("boys sliced and singed"; "women broken open") as well as unsettling images of angels. Readers of historical fiction that captures not just what happened in the past but how it felt to live it will relish this exploration of the well-known story, rendered in sharp-yet-poetic present-tense prose that gallops along even as it reveals a Jehanne who "doesn't know if that's her thoughts, saying it, or the toothless murmur of an angel."

Takeaway: Exhilarating novel illuminating the mind of France's young girl saint.

Comparable Titles: Nicola Griffith's Hild; Hilary Mantel.

Kirkus Reviews

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 ... 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 ... 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.