Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

MARVELOUS

Molly Greeley

Marvelous is the story of the real-life couple rumored to be behind the beloved fairy tale The Beauty and the Beast: Pedro, a hairy child, kidnapped by pirates from his home in the Canary Islands and taken to France as a gift for the king and his queen Catherine de Medici; and Catherine, a beautiful young woman who survives her father's financial ruin by agreeing to marry the king's hairy “wild man.” Together, they must learn to navigate not only the glittering and dangerous world of the French Renaissance court, but the uncharted territory of one another's hearts and minds in this story of otherness, survival, and the endurance of love.

Molly Greeley is the author of The Clergyman's Wife (William Morrow 2019) and The Heiress (William Morrow 2020). She earned her bachelor's degree in English, with a creative writing emphasis, from Michigan State University, where she was the recipient of the Louis B. Sudler Prize in the Arts for Creative Writing. Her short stories and essays have been published in Cicada, Carve and Literary Mama. She works on social media for
a local business, is married and the mother of three children but her Sunday afternoons are devoted to weaving stories into books.
Available products
Book

Published by William Morrow

Comments

“This is such a gorgeously written and unique love story--it'll give readers the kind of good cry that turns books into bestsellers.”

“One of the most moving novels I've read in years, Marvelous is an extraordinary portrait of the extraordinary marriage that inspired Beauty and the Beast. Rich in compassion, wonder, and intimacy, Greeley's latest will break your heart open in the best possible way, proof that the best fairy tales are woven from the mysteries of human experience. Simply superb.”

“Marvelous is truly a tale as old as time, a poetic and fable-like story with echoes of the real Beauty and the Beast, filled with whimsy and wonder that is by turns melancholy and hopeful, exquisitely illuminating the only true forever in our lives: love, family, and the ties that bind us. One of the most purely beautiful books I've ever read.”

“Enchanting. Greeley has pulled off a piece of magic, traversing the16th-century courts of Paris and Rome to tell a dazzling love story about the outcast's ache to be cared for and belong. This book broke my heart and put it back together again.”

“Greeley bridges the four hundred years between a medieval 'animal husband' tale and our own image-obsessed time with beautiful humanity, moving philosophy and spellbinding prose. The world portrayed in Marvelousis rife with people reduced to their exterior value--in particular, the literal value placed on the person of Pedro Gonzales, who was kidnapped as a child, deemed a monster of the court, and subject to the whims and follies of his rulers. But most of all, Marvelousis the story of a family founded for reasons of court, commerce and capital, which none the less manages to transcend its origins and prove how love is always what truly binds and saves us in the end.”