Intricate but derivative.
Da Vinci had a code; now it’s Botticelli’s turn.
Lusty, foul-mouthed Florentine prostitute Luciana happily plies her trade on the Ponte Vecchio in 1482. Her beauty attracts wealthy clients like Bembo, whose priceless black pearl is embedded in her navel. So when Franciscan novice Brother Guido offers her a religious pamphlet, she scoffs. She enjoys the oldest profession, and she’s even been tapped to model for the goddess of spring, one of eight mythical figures depicted in Botticelli’s latest masterpiece, Primavera. After she poses, Luciana steals a cartone, template for the larger Primavera, and replaces it with Guido’s pamphlet. When she returns to her hovel, she finds her roommate dead, throat cut. Fearing she’s angered agents of Florentine despot Lorenzo de’ Medici, Luciana flees to Bembo, but the throat-slashers get there first. Off to Brother Guido’s monastery, where the bloodletting continues. The cartone must be valuable, but why? Guido hopes his noble uncle, Lord Sylvio of Pisa, can intervene with Lorenzo. But Sylvio is poisoned, and his son Niccolò wants Guido dead. The cartone, and Primavera itself, apparently encode a nefarious plot by the Seven, magnates of Italia’s fractious city-states, but to what end? Learning that His Holiness is a co-conspirator shakes Guido’s faith—a positive development for Luciana, who hopes he’ll defrock them both. Eventually, Luciana encounters her long-lost mother, the ruthless Dogaressa of Venice, who consigned her to a convent as a baby after political enemies threatened her life. Guido is arrested, and Luciana whisked back to Venice; she has been promised since infancy to Niccolò as part of her parents’ political schemes. Luciana must escape her mother, find Guido and avert the conspiracy. Though Fiorato (The Glassblower of Murano, 2009, etc.) minutely and tediously parses every development for clues, she glides right over the big question of why convent-raised Luciana strolled off at age 12 with someone who promised her a pretty dress and cheerfully spent the next four years as a street trollop.
Intricate but derivative.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-60636-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella,...
A deceptively rich and cumulatively powerful novel.
At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella, but because the setup seems generic. A black soldier returns from the Korean War, where he faces a rocky re-entry, succumbing to alcoholism and suffering from what would subsequently be termed PTSD. Yet perhaps, as someone tells him, his major problem is the culture to which he returns: “An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.” Ultimately, the latest from the Nobel Prize–winning novelist has something more subtle and shattering to offer than such social polemics. As the novel progresses, it becomes less specifically about the troubled soldier and as much about the sister he left behind in Georgia, who was married and deserted young, and who has fallen into the employ of a doctor whose mysterious experiments threaten her life. And, even more crucially, it’s about the relationship between the brother and his younger sister, which changes significantly after his return home, as both of them undergo significant transformations. “She was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine,” thinks the soldier. He discovers that “while his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her.” As his sister is becoming a woman who can stand on her own, her brother ultimately comes to terms with dark truths and deep pain that he had attempted to numb with alcohol. Before they achieve an epiphany that is mutually redemptive, even the earlier reference to “dogs” reveals itself as more than gratuitous.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-59416-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
This is historical adventure on a grand scale, right up there with the works of Conn Iggulden and Minette Walters.
Plenty of gore from days of yore fills the 12th entry in Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom series (War of the Wolf, 2018, etc.).
The pagan warlord Uhtred of Bebbanburg narrates his 10th-century adventures, during which he hacks people apart so that kingdoms might be stitched together. He is known to some as the Godless or the Wicked, a reputation he enjoys. Edward, King of Wessex, Mercia, and East Anglia is gravely ill, and Uhtred pledges an oath to likely heir Æthelstan to kill two rivals, Æthelhelm and “his rotten nephew,” Ælfweard, when the king dies. Uhtred’s wife, Eadith, wants him to break that oath, but he cannot live with the dishonor of being an oathbreaker. The tale seems to begin in the middle, as though the reader had just turned the last page in the 11th book—and yet it stands alone quite well. Uhtred travels the coast and the river Temes in the good ship Spearhafoc, powered by 40 rowers struggling against tides and currents. He and his men fight furious battles, and he lustily impales foes with his favorite sword, Serpent-Breath. “I don’t kill the helpless,” though, which is one of his few limits. So, early in the story, when a man calling himself “God’s chosen one” declares “We were sent to kill you,” readers may chuckle and say yeah, right. But Uhtred faces true challenges such as Waormund, “lord Æthelhelm’s beast.” Immense bloodletting aside, Cornwell paints vivid images of the filth in the Temes and in cities like Lundene. This is mainly manly fare, of course. Few women are active characters. The queen needs rescuing, and “when queens call for help, warriors go to war.” The action is believable if often gruesome and loathsome, and it never lets up for long.
This is historical adventure on a grand scale, right up there with the works of Conn Iggulden and Minette Walters.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256321-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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