Voices: The Final Hours of Joan of Arc by David Elliott

Co-owner and Editor Peggy Turnbull shares:

Voices: The Final Hours of Joan of Arc by David Elliott, a Young Adult Novel-in-Verse

Voices is a novel-in-verse for young adult readers, a genre new to me, in which an author writes a series of poems to develop a book-length plot. In Voices, poems tell the story of Joan of Arc.

As the child of a tenant farmer in medieval France, Joan found the limitations of the female role intolerable. She began to experience intense visions that revealed a new identity to her, that of knight and military leader. She believed they were sent from God. They led to her betrayal and death.

Poems are written in fifteenth-century French forms true to Joan’s time, such as the triolet, villanelle, and rondelet, helpfully identified in the book’s back content. Others are narrated in free verse by inanimate objects: a needle, a tunic, a sword. Each appears in the shape of whatever it represents. This adds visual interest, but removes line breaks, important for momentum and readability in poems. The creepy, recurring voice of a flame menaces Joan as her enemies close in: “I yearn I yearn I yearn my darling / I yearn I yearn I yearn.”

Elliott, a historically-sensitive author, also draws from prose transcripts of Joan’s two trials. Readers can hear Joan’s transcribed voice, and those of the powerful men who condemned her. Eye-witness testimony from her second trial comes from humbler folk: friends, neighbors, and fellow soldiers, who clear her of heresy.

I recommend Voices to both adults and young adults. As a novel-in-verse, its historicity is a high achievement, as is its storytelling. Voices made me interested in reading more in this form. It is available at the Manitowoc Public Library.