Editorial Reviews of The Matriarch Mission Snippets

 

Read the three Readers Favorite Reviews

“Maxime Trencavel creates a dazzlingly complex world with Oksana’s captivating first-person voice, which wields sharp humor, such as her refrain of being a “simple, humble, Krymchak girl” as strategic armor against a world filled with predatory men. The tension grows with well-crafted scenes of her confrontation with the Cheka’s brutality, giants, and the theft of her daughter. The pacing is propulsive…”

Read the full The Book Commentary Review

“Oksana is a self-deprecating “simple, humble, Krymchak girl” when we first meet her in the story, but her arc is so impeccably drawn that she keeps our attention with her courage to choose love as a sacrifice…Trencavel employs dark humor and sensual prose, interweaving French, Russian, and Jewish texts (from the Kama Sutra to the Talmud) to create a multilingual, feminist epic that explores linear time and patriarchal history.”

Read the full US Review of Books Review

“This depth of Oksana’s inner life is one of the greatest sources of the book’s character development. Told in italics, her thoughts aren’t intrusive or jarring to the story’s progression or dialogue. Instead, they fold seamlessly into each scene, like a commentary one could’ve scribbled in the margins. Because of that, Oksana grows in knowledge and, importantly, in her opinions of the myths in which she became immersed, just as someone new to the series does.”

Read the full Literary Titan Review

“The book also works as a historical adventure, with Crimea and Russia in the early twentieth century giving the story a vivid, unstable ground. The Romanovs, the Bolsheviks, the Cheka, Arctic expeditions, Krymchak identity, famine, exile, and war all press against Oksana’s private mission. Trencavel folds that history into a speculative framework where myths aren’t decorative background.”