Ginny is obedient and self-effacing, the modest counterpart to her sister Rose who blows through the story like a hurricane. This is where The Queens of Innis Lear, a high fantasy Lear retelling, fell spectacularly short for me, and this is where Smiley succeeded.Įach of Smiley’s characters is tremendously well-drawn, none more-so than the narrator Ginny. So I’m much less interested in the details and more interested in the author’s vision, in the ways in which they interact with the original play even–especially–when they choose to deviate.
Half of what I just wrote, what Smiley decided to do with these characters, I don’t agree with it doesn’t fit my own idea of what a picture-perfect retelling should look like. Rose has cancer, and she has two daughters Ginny has had five miscarriages and desperately wants a child Loren (Edgar), in my opinion one of the smartest characters in the original play, is here an afterthought and a bit of a sycophantic idiot Pete (Cornwall) is a recovering abusive husband, his relationship with Rose unhappy and volatile, while Ginny’s marriage to Ty (Albany) is placid in comparison the Fool is omitted Jess (Edmund) is not a scheming mastermind, but instead an unmoored drifter whose interruption of Ginny’s life is unplanned, haphazard.Īnd as someone who’s read King Lear about a million times and has spent countless hours thinking about these characters, if I am actively choosing to spend my time reading King Lear retellings, I can’t allow myself to get mired in the details, or else reading retellings just becomes a self-defeating exercise. While the premise sounds literally transposed from the Shakespeare play, enough details are reinvented to assure the reader that literality is not Smiley’s intention. When their aging father announces his retirement and intention to turn the farm over to his three daughters, Caroline admits skepticism and is turned away Ginny and Rose are then left to battle his cruelty and deterioration into drunkenness while keeping the farm afloat. It’s told through the eyes of Ginny, the eldest daughter and Goneril figure, who lives on their father’s thousand acre farm with her husband in a house adjacent to her sister Rose’s (Regan)–the youngest sister, Caroline (Cordelia) has moved away and works as a lawyer. A Thousand Acres is King Lear meets twentieth-century midwestern farming oddly enough, a thematic match made in heaven, the mores of the small Iowan community so richly detailed that the stakes effortlessly mirror medieval English court life.
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