Alexander Chee’s Regal, Epic Queen of the Night

Barnes & Noble

With his second novel The Queen of the Night, a coming of age tale about the life, loves, and career of a self-made opera singer in late 19th-century Paris, Whiting Award winner Alexander Chee sets several ambitious challenges for himself: He’s going to write in an approachable way about a grandiose subject. He’s going to integrate fiction and fact, story and history, war and peace, high art and low, imaginary can-can dancers and actual empresses. And he’s going to keep a reader enthralled through 550 pages.

Notes From Your Bookseller

The result is a book that feels in many ways like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which exposes the hypocrisies of Victorian high society through the rise of gimlet-eyed, unsentimental social climber Becky Sharp. Like Sharp, Chee’s protagonist Lilliet Berne is a survivor. Born to and then tragically parted from a poor family in the American midwest, she uses intelligence, talent, sex appeal, deception, and every other tool in her arsenal to escape one grim situation after another until she finally arrives where she belongs: onstage, as one of the finest sopranos in Europe.
Unlike Sharp, though, Berne never assumes she will emerge unscathed. As she tells us early on, “the hubris was mine. And the gods did not kill for hubris—for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn.” She goes by many names over the course of these pages, including the Settler’s Daughter (as a circus performer), Jou-jou (as a sex worker in a high-end bordello), and La Generale (as a star). Yet she retains the fear that the gods will keep track of her, regardless of what she calls herself or where she hides, and that it is her fate to be punished in some dramatic, climactic way. Heroines of operas nearly always are. “Why,” she asks, “was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?”
Despite her qualms, Berne is committed to living by her own lights. She refuses to succumb to anyone’s authority: she does not belong to the tenor who buys her freedom from the seraglio, or to the nuns who take her in when she flees the tenor, or to the monarch who employs her when she slips away from the nuns, or to any of the others who take her in and expect her allegiance in exchange. She does not even submit to the demands of her own talent. Though she is cautioned that she is a Falcon, meaning that her particular kind of voice is “among the most fragile,” she refuses to let it dictate what she can and cannot do.
Her voice may be fragile, but Berne is not and will not allow herself to be. And so, in many ways, the animating question of the epic remains how high Chee will allow his falcon to soar before yanking her back down. After all, where heroes are often celebrated for making bold, even rash, decisions, heroines of 19th-century novels are punished almost as frequently as sopranos. Throughout battles, famine, duels, betrayals, and the resonant horror that comes from wearing the wrong dress to an important occasion, much of the book’s tension comes from whether Chee, plainly fascinated by his ambitious and self-willed creation, will feel the need to humble Berne, especially as she takes greater and greater risks.
At times, Chee ratchets up the melodrama to an almost uncomfortable degree, and not all of his characters feel as complex and deserving of sympathy as our Generale. These are the kinds of quibbles some audience members have with opera itself: that it is fixated on grand themes at the expense of believable concerns; that it can feel broad and artificial, rather than subtle and incisive. But the deftness of Chee’s prose, as well as the generosity of spirit, carries the plot. Likewise, the culmination of The Queen of the Night, which is as delightful and unexpected as anything that precedes it, deserves several curtain calls. Chee has conjured up both a diva to remember and an ending that is worthy of her.

Fiction

Celebra el Mes de la Herencia Hispana con libros que inspiran, emocionan y dejan recuerdos imborrables.

Este Mes de la Herencia Hispana, te invitamos a descubrir una selección de libros para adultos y chicos que destacan el talento, la creatividad y la diversidad de grandiosos escritores latinoamericanos. Son historias que entretienen, inspiran, y nos permiten acercarnos a distintas experiencias y perspectivas, mientas celebramos las aportaciones de la comunidad hispana en los Estados Unidos.

The Black Shield: A Guest Post from Wilbur L. Cooper

In The Black Shield, reporter Wilbert L. Cooper explores the complex lives of Black cops living and working in Cleveland as part of the Black Shield organization. Read on for an essay from Wilbur L. Cooper about writing The Black Shield. When I talk about The Black Shield, I often tell people that I started writing it in 2020, the year of George Floyd's murder. I do this because the book is nominally about Black cops, and in the aftermath of Floyd's murder, there was a lot of talk about diversity as a panacea for the racial problems of American policing. Some people made the argument that the hiring of more Black cops would ensure that what happened to Floyd would never happen again. And it's true, I did spend 2020 talking to experts and historians, diving into police archives and reading studies. I did a lot of real journalism stuff. But if I’m being honest, I didn't start thinking about Black cops in 2020. I've been reflecting on the conflicting promise and plight of Black cops my whole life, because I was born into a family of Black cops. I've had family members in the Cleveland police department since the end of World War II up through the Black Lives Matter Era. And so I’ve been thinking about Black cops and what they mean and what they do since I was a child watching my mother, a strong Black woman named Gayle, don a blue uniform and a silver badge. Even as a little child, I desperately wanted to know who my mother transformed into when she went out into the world with a city-issued gun in her holster. And when there have been these visceral incidents of police violence like George Floyd or Tyre Nichols, I've wondered, What my mother's role could be in an institution like that? What does that killing have to do with the work of my father, my sister, my uncle and great uncles? To answer that question, I've been having talks with my family that I never had before, tracing their journeys into policing, as well as talks with their peers and Black cops from all across the country of various generations. So while The Black Shield encapsulates my own story, it's also filled with all of their testimony. Their witnessing for you from behind the blue wall is more harrowing than what you might hear from an activist who advocates for police abolition. For the readers who are still wondering if diversity can make policing work for Black folks, you will have a lot to think about when reading my book. But The Black Shield also addresses much bigger issues of family, assimilation, survival in America, and freedom. I hope that you all will go on that journey with me.

The Best Audiobooks of September 2026

September brings us cooler nights and the start of fall's biggest releases. Get ready for stories of threshing day with Rebecca Yarros, R. F. Kuang is back with a story of finding home and Harry Connick Jr. pays tribute to his late mother in musical style. These are just some of what's to come this fall season. Shop even more new releases here.