An ambitious and engrossing tale of Renaissance Italy.
A historical novel tells the story of a soldier caught in the center of a Vatican-sanctioned plot against the Medicis.
It’s 1478 in Florence. Giovan Battista da Montesecco, the captain of the Apostolic Palace Guard and commandant of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, sits in a prison cell atop the city’s great clock tower, forced to write a confession of how he conspired to murder the leaders of Florence’s greatest family. Flash back to a year earlier: along with two of the pope’s favored nephews, Giovan plots to assassinate Lorenzo de’ Medici—known as Lorenzo the Magnificent—as well as his attractive and popular brother Giuliano. The aging Giovan’s complicity is based solely on the plot’s approval by his master, Pope Sixtus IV, who informs the conflicted captain that “we will absolve you for everything if you rid us of Lorenzo and his brother.” Still grieving from the death of his only son in battle, Giovan finds himself in an unlikely role for one so late in life: that of Lorenzo’s assassin. The story that unfolds takes the reader from Rome to Florence, Pisa to Constantinople, knitting together a struggle of power, intrigue, and revenge against the backdrop of one of history’s most dramatic epochs. The reader experiences the story from the point of view of other characters as well, including Fioretta Gorini, the mistress of the handsome Giuliano, and Thadeous of Constantinople, a Greek tutor who survived the conquest of his native city 25 years earlier and now serves as instructor to one of the pope’s nephews in Pisa. Van Roekel (Prisoner Moon, 2012, etc.) summons the milieu of Renaissance Italy with expert detail, and the novel is full of the sort of cameos that fans of historical fiction love—at one point, Giovan nearly gets in a swordfight with Botticelli inside the still-under-construction Sistine Chapel. The pope says to Giovan, “My dear Captain, we hope you let that young man live. He does have talent.” Intricate and gripping, the book keeps the reader racing along with Giovan and company all the way to the bloody end.
An ambitious and engrossing tale of Renaissance Italy.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-72917-5
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Triptych Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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