Volume 272
Issue 33
08/25/2025
In this week's edition of Endnotes, we take a look at Marianne Leone's Christina the Astonishing.
Here's how the book came together:
Marianne Leone
“I am still friends with and have dedicated Christina the Astonishing to the girls I knew all through my 12 years in parochial school. We meet at least once a year. It is a soul-deep comfort to be surrounded by a group of women you have known since you were four. Christina the Astonishing is about breaking free from what constrained you and coming back to the place where you first were formed to create something truthful.”
Colleen Mohyde
“Several editors who saw Christina the Astonishing had a very literal reading. We were lucky to find in Akashic a publisher who viewed the story as Marianne and I did—who appreciated the universal themes in any good coming-of-age story, every young girl’s quest for independence, the desire to rebel and break free of constraint, and the longing to blossom into your real self.”
Johnny Temple
“Marianne delivered a relatively clean manuscript to us, so it was not a heavy editing process. She had originally written the book as a series of connected short stories, so the key editorial objective was to smooth out the transitions between the chapters and eliminate some redundancies. Marianne is easy to work with, and a hell of a lot of fun.”
Trudi Gershinov
“After conferring with the author, we went through a number of ideas to illustrate the book’s coming-of-age story, which would appeal to a wider audience. However, once the author supplied two images of herself, it perfectly depicted the coming-of-age aspect. You see Christina as an innocent Catholic school girl and as an adult woman dressed as a nun, seemingly seducing the reader with her gaze, to join her on her journey.”
