MARY VENTURA AND THE NINTH KINGDOM

With only 40 minutes at her disposal, narrator Orlagh Cassidy turns Mary Ventura, a naïve and compliant young woman, into a frantic yet resolved individual who is willing to risk all to save herself from a preordained fate. Sylvia Plath's allegorical story was rejected when first submitted for publication in 1952, as this audiobook's introduction informs us, and it languished until the present day. The story is cleanly and clearly executed by Cassidy. While the writing could be judged simplistic and rough, consulting both Plath's poetry and the classics reveals it to be as fully realized and dark a vision as is found in a better-known contemporary work, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." K.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2019]