Book excerpt: Bea Chance is an exceptional woman, inventor and entrepreneur, with a thriving business, successful marriage and four grown children: Dick, her right-hand man; Bruce, a Vietnam veteran; Corey, her only daughter, and John, a disc jockey. A musician and pioneer in technology, she combined her musical and computer expertise to develop a system for musical composition and simultaneous recording and playback which she applied to the teaching of music in schools. When she decides suddenly to retire, partially in response to the death of her husband, her departure sends her family and her corporate, as well as corporeal, systems into chaos. This novel describes how she moves from being a woman with power to becoming a powerful, compassionate woman. Her personal transformation, in turn, has dynamic effects on her own mother, Mildred; her children; her co-worker and left-hand woman, Clare; and her friend Pearl. A reflection on gender and power, loss, metamorphosis and love, this novel explores issues of mothering, inheritance, and generation for modern women. An "oppositional narrative" based on Shakespeare's King Lear, Queen Bea explores what happens when the king becomes a queen and when an ancient tale is translated into a contemporary idiom. "Blanchard's book is bound to become a classic for women's studies and contemporary literature courses alike because it grounds an engaging second wave feminist novel in explicating essays that both honor and explode the typical canon of options used." -Ida Kialutsi, artist and professor