Will I love Matrix?

I have always loved the lais of Marie de France and have taught them for years, introducing students to her proto-feminism and sly humor (check out Lanval for a send-up of the conventional medieval romance).

So when I came across this novel, I snapped it up, and it didn’t disappoint. I was captivated by Groff’s depiction of Marie: a rebel against religion and conventional gender roles, an exile in a convent who becomes the hero and hones her craft of writing.

Groff swept me into the book with her luminous descriptions of atmospheres and landscapes. I loved the gawky and… show more.

What an amazing book! I'd had it on my TBR list for a long time, but I kept myself from reading novels and especially anything medieval while I was getting The Last Highland King completed. This was a treat and a treasure after a lot of studying and writing. I knew Marie de France somewhat, as the writer of lais and courtly romances, but this evocation of the scholarly writer places her at the help of an English abbey that she remakes into a female utopia, protected from the outside world by a massive labyrinth. Wildly inventive, but also emotionally… show more.

This immediately immersed me in another time and place. Apparently, I’m very clear in my bookish likes, because it was recommended to me multiple times due to the combination of nuns and sapphic content. Luckily, it lived up to the recommendations!

It is very well written and extremely atmospheric, and it drew me right into its medieval world. Groff managed to create characters who feel appropriate to their era but who are also accessible to a modern reader, which is not an easy task. This helped me to become emotionally invested in the book.

This book brought an enigmatic historical personage from the Middle Ages to vivid life. Little is known about the actual poet Marie de France so Lauren Groff had a blank slate to work from. She rose to the challenge, imagining and setting down on paper a fully human woman, who experienced love, trauma, mysteries and prejudice with courage and creativity. The writing was so lucid and specific that I truly felt that I had time-traveled to France in the eleventh century and met Marie in person. I marveled at the way she didn't let her big emotions prevent her from… show more.

I had no idea 12th century nuns could be as violent or as libidinous!

“She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.” I read these opening sentences over and over. They both threw me off and enchanted me. What is this strange cadence? I wondered.

The song of the words wove around me and drew me into a world both political and mystical. In some ways like the Avalon of Marion Zimmer Bradley, in other ways, most definitely not. I have friends who are Lauren Groff fans. I have never made it past the first few pages… until I picked this… show more.

One does not imagine a novel that takes place almost exclusively inside a 12th-century British convent to be a form of escapism, but then, one is often wrong. And by one, I mean me. I picked up Lauren Groff’s Matrix on a whim when my writer friend Amber Sparks posted illustrations her 8-year-old daughter did, inspired by the book.

From the opening page, I was moved and astounded by the depth of historical detail Groff imbues her heroine’s world with and by the sheer force of feminine, feminist creativity propelling the book forward. There are labyrinths and orchards, mystical visions,… show more.

This is a book I often give to friends for birthdays, etc. It is a delightfully strange and profound tale of a 12th-century French girl who is sent to an English convent, where she forms her own city of women within the walls.

The protagonist, Marie de France, has an unflinching vision of an alternate world informed by divine visions. It’s a strange joy to read on as Marie reimagines a decrepit abbey.

I never imagined I would be so invested in the lives of 12th-century nuns, but here we are.

Groff’s writing has such energy, I was completely consumed by the story of Marie, who, guided by visions, transforms an English convent into a utopia for the nuns within, protected from the world without. I was blown away by the sheer amount of knowledge that adds texture to the book: knowledge of plants, animals, medicinal herbs, clothing.

It feels deeply researched but not tedious. Everything about this novel feels propulsive.

Groff paints a picture of medieval France so stunning that it makes you care about a character so intensely it’s almost as if you were having sex.

The extent of the paradox of being in love with a cloistered (literally) lesbian abbess who “lived” eight hundred years ago is matched only by the bloodlust of rooting for her to murder and outlive her enemies.