Well-researched, proudly lusty historical fiction.
A young, gay Leonardo da Vinci navigates Renaissance Florence and its troubled leadership.
Melanson’s assured debut is set between 1471 and 1483, crucial years for both the artist and his homeland. Leonardo had completed his apprenticeship as a painter, but his efforts to find wealthy patrons are waylaid by his lack of interest in delivering conventional work, along with his romance with Iac, a prostitute and aspiring goldsmith who serves as his muse. Meanwhile, Lorenzo, the head of the powerful banking Medici family, is at loggerheads with new leadership in the Vatican, which threatens his ability to assign plum church spots for family members and maintain the family role as the Pope’s bankers. Generally alternating between Leonardo and Lorenzo, the book’s chapters limn each man’s subtle influence on the other; crackdowns on homosexual activity to appease the Pope make Leonardo a target, and Leonardo’s growing reputation as a brilliant painter brings him into the circle of well-off patrons (including Lorenzo’s brother). The historical squabbles between various Italian states during the Quattrocento can get convoluted, but Melanson generally works his way through that by emphasizing Leonardo’s sensuality (sexual and artistic) and the violence that stalks the Medici clan; an assassination attempt against Lorenzo in 1478 is a key element of the plot. Though Lorenzo and Leonardo claim roughly equal space, the novel is strongest as a portrait of Leonardo, who must navigate sexual repression (Florenzer was a Habsburg term for homosexual), his father’s disapproval, and a mind busily developing inventions when not delivering brilliant works like the Madonna of the Carnation. He’s a delectable counterpoint to Lorenzo’s machinations in Florence, where “coin is the one thing this city pays allegiance to.”
Well-researched, proudly lusty historical fiction.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781324095033
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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