'The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls,' by Ursula Hegi book review

In January 1362, a vast tidal surge in the North Sea killed more than 25,000 people (some estimate as many as 100,000) in a region that now encompasses parts of Britain, Germany, Denmark and the Low Countries. Known as the Grote Mandrenke, “the great drowning of men,” the storm reshaped entire coastlines, submerging towns and breaking apart islands. Among the latter was Strand, in present-day northern Germany, where the sea swallowed the prosperous town of Rungholt.

Nearly three centuries later in 1634, another devastating storm killed 6,000 people and carved off the peninsular town of Nordstrand from what remained of Strand. It is here, on a summer day in 1878, that Lotte Jansen is playing on the beach with her four young children when another (this time fictional) rogue wave engulfs them and rips three of the children from her hands. Only Lotte and the youngest, infant Wilhelm, survive. From this nearly incomprehensible tragedy, novelist Ursula Hegi spins a surprisingly sunlit tale of grief and rebirth, drawing on history and folklore to create an indelible portrait of a family and community forged in crisis.

A U.S. citizen since moving here from Germany as a young adult, Hegi is known for her novels set in Burgdorf, Germany, during and after World War II; books in which she deploys a rare gift for depicting outsiders — most memorably Trudi Montag, the young woman with dwarfism who’s a central character in Hegi’s best-selling “Stones From the River.” In her new book, “The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls,” Hegi performs a kind of alchemical cartography, transporting readers to a place so vividly rendered they may undergo culture shock upon reentering our own damaged world.

Nordstrand’s bleak, quicksilver beauty mirrors the mercurial fortunes of its inhabitants. In the moments after the freak wave, Lotte kisses baby Wilhelm and tosses him, too, into the ocean. “Take him, God, in return for my other three,” she cries, her act witnessed by the villagers who’ve rushed to search for the children. Lotte’s husband, Kalle Jansen, saves Wilhelm. Unable to forgive his wife for this momentary madness, or his infant son for surviving when his other three children drowned, Kalle joins a traveling circus that makes regular rounds through Nordstrand, abandoning Lotte and Wilhelm.

Another villager is 11-year-old Tilli. “A pretty man,” she thinks when she sees Kalle with Lotte shortly before tragedy overwhelms them. “Dangerous to marry a man prettier than you. Every girl knows that.” Tilli herself knows both too much and not enough about men and women: She has been sent to Nordstrand’s St. Margaret Home for Pregnant Girls after being impregnated by her twin brother.

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Locals shun the girls at St. Margaret, named for the patron saint of pregnant women and housed in a mansion built by a bishop who favored peacocks and fine porcelain. Here the nuns who run St. Margaret (many of whom also gave birth as children) have created their own proto-feminist idyll. Same-sex relationships among the nuns are condoned. Sister Hildegunde paints visionary images on the chapel walls of St. Margaret defeating a dragon. Other nuns teach the girls biology, physics and mathematics, along with weaving, painting, poetry and theater, and eventually child care and midwifery.

“They don’t act like real nuns,” the girls whisper to one another.

“They don’t even punish us.”

“Maybe they’re not real nuns.”

Perhaps not, but then everyone in Nordstrand seems to have stepped from a folk tale, or a canvas by the Biedermeier-style painter Carl Spitzweg. Sabine, the circus’s seamstress and Lotte’s close friend, lives in a circus wagon with her daughter, Heike, who’s 20 but has the mind of a child. When honey begins to flow down her wagon’s walls, Sabine discovers it houses an immense beehive. It’s a neat metaphor for Hegi’s novel, in which myriad coteries — families, the girls and nuns at St. Margaret, the circus and the Old Women who act as Nordstand’s Greek chorus — coexist yet remain mysterious to one another, each possessing its own hidden sweetness.

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At times, the sweetness overwhelms the book’s grittier, more compelling story lines. Childlike Heike doesn’t just marry a beekeeper, she plays the cello like a dream. Kalle, a toymaker, leaves the circus to visit Lotte, arriving on a zebra. Still, even the most fanciful scenes feel deeply embedded in grief, as parents mourn their lost children — the Jansen siblings snatched by the North Sea; Sabine’s lovely Heike, vulnerable in her inability to ever understand the world of grown-ups; Tilli’s infant daughter, taken from her arms and adopted by a bourgeois family.

Brought into the Jansen household to help care for Wilhelm, Tilli begins to think of the baby as her own, and herself as a daughter to Lotte and Kalle after the couple reunites. But the Jansens’ reconciliation is based upon a shared delusion as dangerous as Nordstrand’s unstable sands: the legend of Rungholt, the town lost in the 14th-century Grote Mandrenke.

“Rungholt, so near that when the wind breaks off, you may hear the bells in its church towers beneath the surface of the Nordsee where the sunken island lies intact ... awaiting the next time it will rise in its entirety ... just long enough to let you enter.”

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Lotte and Kalle’s belief that they will find their lost children alive when Rungholt magically reappears threatens not just their renewed love for each other and their son, but also their lives and Tilli’s. Hegi’s deeply compassionate novel charts the shadowlands where grief makes its home, a place “where wanting to believe becomes believing,” and where a family holding hands on the sand is a more miraculous sight than a lost island rising from the waves.

Elizabeth Hand’s16th novel, “The Book of Lamps and Banners,” will be published in September.

The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls

By Ursula Hegi

Flatiron Books. 274 pp. $26.99

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