4 stars

I would NEVER have thought that I'd be interested in a book with this particular subject matter, but it is impossible to read this and not be unwaveringly amazed by the amount of work Groff has clearly put in to constructing this. There must be Carrie from _Homeland_ -style charts keeping all of this material in order (and maybe an adaptation of Alice's chart from _The L Word_, now that I think more about this). Truly, this is a feat, and I've not read anything else quite like it.

The central character, Marie (De France), has a challenging origin story and a life that readers get to see most of; this is fortunate because there are some relative twists and turns. Marie enters this new phase of her life with great disdain and some understandable hopelessness, but then she leads a personal and communal revolution (in all kinds of ways). Watching Marie and Co. develop in the face of extreme restrictions and lack of opportunity for women at this time is gripping. Many of these characters experience extremes when it comes to having no agency and then utterly changing the landscape. Reading this made me glad not to be a peer but also fully energized on these characters' behalves.

My previous experiences reading Groff have been positive but SO different from this novel. This isn't the piece to jump into just because you love Groff. Dive into this one if you are looking for something new, fresh, and unexpected; you'll get some solid queer rep as an added bonus. For a certain kind of reader, there's an exquisite payoff here.

Marie is exiled to England by Eleanor of Aquitaine to become the prioress of a poor and desperate abbey. Full disclosure: I studied medieval history in college and the blurb for this immediately caught my eye. In Groff’s latest novel she explores a possible life of Marie of France including the violence of the times, and the passion, faith, power and creativity of women. This is a beautifully written, fascinating read.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this. It's not a subject matter that would typically draw me in, but I found the writing lyrical and the setting interesting.

I will admit to having a bit of trepidation before starting 'Matrix," given its medeival setting [I'm usually not a fan of historical fiction]. But I'll follow Lauren Groff anywhere and was totally absorbed by the extraordinary journey of Marie de France and her personal and political crusade. The tale is relevant to our contemporary struggles and packs a powerful punch. Recommended!

This never quite opened up for me… It’s a medieval girlboss fantasia set almost entirely in an abbey, loosely based on the little that’s known about Marie de France. This Marie is kicked out of the French royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine and sent to run the abbey at age seventeen. That’s about where the real hardships for Marie end. The abbey is poor when she gets there, and over the course of the book we see her turn it into a rich and profitable abbey. Mild threats from the Queen to tax them higher are somehow easily evaded. Conflict comes and goes like that, showing up in little bursts and soon being overcome by Marie’s tall-tale-like ingenuity and power. The story is told at a distance, spanning the whole lifetime of Marie, so I understand from an efficiency perspective not wanting to get into any one challenge she faced. But, for me, a boredom set in halfway through that didn’t ever leave. It’s hard to be engaged if you know that any trouble that comes her way will quickly and often unbelievably be tossed off with ease. Towers go up despite protests, attackers are defeated with hardly any loss or pain to the nuns, sexism is seemingly done away with when the townspeople and the church leaders and everyone else behold the power of Marie. It makes the novel feel cartoonish, like a superhero story without a compelling villain. A reader is supposed to have the same awe that the fellow nuns do, but it’s one thing to be told you should feel awe and another thing to feel it. I think it’s a great project to tell a story about medieval women without the usual doom and gloom, but it does a disservice to focus so much on the magical exceptionality of Marie. Like any story about exceptions overcoming the oppression of their groups, there’s a risk of making it seem like—well, if this one person can do all that, then isn’t every other person’s oppression kind of a fault of their shortcomings? I.e. while trying to do a feminist reclamation, it has whiffs of a conservative bootstrap tale. Without realistic, believable, grounded conflict, it’s hard to put the awe you're supposed to have for Marie in perspective.

This is a bizarre book. So bizarre I'm not sure how I feel about it. I wouldn't say I liked it, but I didn't not like it.

Too tall and too uncouth, Marie is sent to England to be a priorcess of an abbey full of starving nuns. Through her genius and large physical stature, she finds ways to make the abbey profitable. Once she is in charge of the abbey, she receives visions from Virgin Mary on how to make the abbey great. These changes don't make her popular with people outside the abbey. She must use her brains to deal with them.

How to describe the protagonist of Matrix? The author does it best: "she appears to all eyes as greater than a mere woman, she appears as a myth; some say a saint, some say a witch." Marie is based on the life of French poet Marie de France.
Marie is like no other woman when she rides out of France heading for England and the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her mother and aunts are dead and as the 17 year-old, illegitimate daughter of English royalty she expects a welcome at court. The Queen has other ideas and banishes Marie to a poor abbey. When she accepts her fate and tempers her brash personality, she eventually becomes the savior of the abbey and it's Abbess.
Groff brings Marie and her remarkable achievements. to life as she fights political and religious threats, protects her nuns and the abbey property over the course of her lifetime. The author has written a 12th century feminist novel filled with feminine strength, sensuality and triumph.,

This. Book. Matrix absolutely consumed me from the moment I began reading it. I picked it up at every chance & it was all I could think about in between. The way this novel lays out the life of Marie de France, a woman in 12th century France, banished to a convent in England, is as extraordinary as the character herself. I loved that this story focused so entirely on women & I loved the idea of that power coming from a convent, a female-centered space, within a patriarchal institution. Lauren Groff's writing is some of the most beautiful literary fiction I've read so I wasn't surprised to find the writing here remarkable but there are parts that really took my breath away. I loved this book so much & I can't wait to discuss it with my fellow litfic lovers.

What do you do with a wellborn woman who doesn't fit into your society's norms for "ladies". If its the 12th Century a convent is a good place to send them. Thus we find Marie of France, a woman who had been off to the Crusades as a child' sent to an abbey by her benefactress. Eleanor of Aquitaine. Ah, is this really as bad as it seems? Can Marie turn this into an opportunity? A good story of strong women managing to take power within the constraints of the medieval period.
(This review is of an advance reader copy.)

Not my particular cup of tea, though I’ve never been a huge fan of Ms. Groff’s. That being said, she’s obviously a very talented novelist and deserves a place in any collection!

Friends: This is 100% not my speed and I fucking loved it. I wept, more than once. More importantly, I felt, quite inexplicably, almost impossibly, actually, like part of the story, or, more precisely, like this story, which has not one thing in the world to do with me, was for me...too.

If you want unique historical fiction, check out Lauren Groff's latest, a 12th century historical fiction piece about a reluctant nun, the abbey she brings under her control, and the impact on the world around her. This is part side-tracked royal history, part abbey exploration, full Lauren Groff's magical writing and piercing characters. No Catholicism required to enjoy.

In the ideal abbey, the nuns are liberated from the demands that society places upon other women. They are free to create their own little haven, free to love each other any way they like, free to posit a divine feminine and direct their prayers to Mary and female saints, free to care for one another under the soothing if demanding rhythms of the monastic routine and the holy seasons.

Under the patronage of Eleanor of Acquitaine, 12th-century Marie de France does all of this and more, starting with a poor abbey with a few underfed, demoralized nuns. She exerts amazing leadership as Abbess while becoming an author, poet, mystic, and legend.

Marie's abbey is sometimes rocked by corruption in Rome, the vicissitudes of politics, and even sometimes the demanding extremes of Marie's ambitions. The nuns must be ready to pay any tax or tribute that the authorities demand. This doesn't stop them from creating an extraordinary world that is almost like an empire, on their secluded and blessed isle. As always when women carve out exclusive space, men are both suspicious and intrusive.

This is a tour de force with compelling characterization—a hard-hitting feminist novel that rivals the best fiction of Rumer Godden on the monastic life. Groff invites the reader to imagine a history in which religion was shaped not by warriors, monks, and male church councils, but by muscular mystic nuns like Marie who simply crave scholarship, love, and peace.

Lauren Groff is incredible. This book seemed very thoroughly researched. There are a lot of historical fiction novels that are bestsellers that are no where near this caliber of writing and research. I will definitely recommend. Thank you for allowing me to read it!

This is such a magnificent book. It's beautifully written; it delivers an amazing portrayal of life as it might have been in a medieval abbey; it has memorable and fully realized characters. But the thing that really makes this book sing is how it runs counter to so many standard expectations.

The book's opening scans like a bildungsroman, so you might reasonably expect to spend the first hundred pages with young Marie grappling with her new role as a prioress, but we spend very little time with young Marie, and much, much more with Marie as she is in her middle age, at the height of her power. And then, given that power, you might anticipate conflict, an external enemy: but there isn't any. Oh, there's conflict, but it's multiple little conflicts, each dealt with in a handful of pages, but no overarching antagonist, nothing nearly so clean cut. More than anything else - more than rooting us in the time and place of the abbey, more than depicting Marie's amassing of power - there is always a sense of life in motion, the action cutting away to give us a look at the goings-on of the most minor of minor characters before swinging back around to Marie again. And all these characters, it should be said, are women. There is no named male character in this book. In fact, the word "men" doesn't make an appearance at all.

They're still there, in the periphery. But unnamed, all their actions serve to do is to throw the nuns and Marie into sharper relief. It's amazing, really what Groff is able to say with this bit of white space, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find their absence refreshing.

Ever so slightly less enjoyable is Groff's attempt at addressing climate change here. It works when she discusses the direct impact Marie's building projects have on the environment, but it becomes hokey when she tries to shoehorn the earth's warming into Marie's visions.

There are a few other unwieldly elements in here for me (I don't know that I really needed each construction projected detailed to me), but they don't take much away from the overall brilliance of this book. It is a truly beautiful novel, and I would definitely recommend it.

I felt ambivalent about this one. On the one hand, this is sort of a love story to ancient female power and strength---how can you not root for Marie, who is the champion of the abbey for decades, who is clever, compassionate, bold and creative in a time when women most certainly were viewed as an underclass? The novel feels like an anthem, but perhaps too much an in-your-face anthem.

Despite the likeability of the story (Marie is a heroine, through and through, with few missteps), I found the book strangely flat. Perhaps it's the writing style, with dialogue captured in the main text, or the fact that because the book spans so many years, characters come and go without making a true impression.

In some ways, this book felt like an arcane history lesson on the operation and make-up of a Benedictine abbey (which made sense after reading Groff's afterword, which described her research). The detail was interesting but distracting.

Altogether uneven, though I am positive this will be a commercial success and a popular read. Would recommend.

The world of literary and historical fiction consists of writers, authors, and artists. Lauren Groff is an artist.

I first came across Ms. Groff when publicists for her 2008 debut novel, “Monsters of Templeton” introduced her as a native of Cooperstown, New York, raised two blocks from the Baseball Hall of Fame. Sold. I have been hooked ever since. “Arcadia” was released to great acclaim in 2012 and resonated with me 100%. “Fates and Furies” (2015) blew me away. Lots of great short stories, essays, literary criticism, and public appearances have had me constantly checking her Website and Social Media to make sure that I was keeping up. Her 2018 collection “Florida” is spectacular, authentic, at turns hysterically funny, most often disturbingly real. It truly captures the weirdness of my adopted home.

“Matrix” heralds the end of a 6-year wait for a fourth novel. I was slightly taken aback by the initial description of the story as about ”….seventeen-year-old Marie de France----sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease…” That’s not my usual “cuppa”. But it’s published by Riverhead {who I love and has never steered me wrong), and it’s a novel by the artist Lauren Goff. I know that it will be beautifully written and that it will be mind-boggling, and that I will be impacted in a deep way.

“Matrix” is a profoundly feminist and matriarchal book. Men are hardly mentioned and, when they are, they are characterized as crude creatures hardly higher on the chain of evolution than low-level animals, dangerous, and deceitful. Women do everything and do it in a highly competent manner. Once again, Lauren Groff exceeded my expectations. The beautiful writing and characterizations were top-notch, as I knew they would be. But “Matrix” is a far more complex and compelling narrative that kept my close attention throughout. Highly recommended.

Thank you to Riverhead Books and NetGalley for the eARC.

This book is unusually quiet. Quiet is such a weird descriptor, right? This book is like a cold wet stone.

Deemed too large, coarse, and ugly for either marriage or life at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie de France is sent to become prioress of a small, poor abbey in England at the age of 17. From there Marie leads a life of surprising success as she keeps correspondence with Eleanor from afar and tends to the needs of her abbey. Beautifully constructed and feverishly told, Matrix will draw you in and pull you through the currents of Marie's life effortlessly.

Groff is an master of syntax and metaphor. Her descriptions of place and time are simple yet affective. This little novel features well-developed and interesting characters but I found some issues with the pacing, which was slow despite the overall sense of yearning and urgency. It was an interesting dichotomy. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley. :)