Introduction

One winter morning James Jack Wright finds ninety-four-year-old Marguerite Deo—the woman he has always known as “Tante”—lying dead in the woods outside his cabin, clad only in a flowered nightgown. With this arresting scene, Elizabeth Inness-Brown ushers readers into her mysterious and lyrical narrative, the story of two closely braided lives that forces a reconsideration of our notions of maternity, loyalty, love, and perhaps death itself.

As James Jack sets out to fulfill Marguerite’s unusual last wishes, the narrative unveils the secrets of their pasts. It arcs from Depression-era New Orleans to a barren New England island at the turn of the century, from an illicit passion and an unforgivable crime to the relationship between a small boy and a tough, reclusive woman who turns out to possess an unsuspected capacity for love.

Editorial Review

From the first incantatory sentence in Burning Marguerite ("I can see spring in winter") to the last, Elizabeth Inness-Brown draws us into a north-country winter's tale with all the strange power of a dream. The novel is set on remote Grain Island, reachable only by ferry. First settled by the French, Grain Island now has two distinct populations: wealthy summer folks and hardy year-round inhabitants, who while away winter days ice fishing. Burning Marguerite begins in winter with a mysterious death, and goes on to reveal other mysteries and other deaths, including a violent crime. It alternates between the third-person point of view of 35-year-old James Jack and the first-person musings of Tante, the 94-year-old woman who raised him after his parents drowned when he was 4 years old. To all appearances a spinster, Tante has many secrets, including how she lost the little finger of her left hand and why she fled Grain Island for New Orleans as a young woman and never returned until after her parents died. James Jack keeps a secret of his own--a promise he made to Tante, one that embroils him with the island's sheriff, who almost adopted him, and an unhappily married woman. Burning Marguerite is a poetically written and haunting debut novel. --Susan Biskeborn

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