bookpagedev

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

When the sleuth is a shrink

Review by bookpagedev

As Keith Ablow’s Compulsion opens, we meet Massachusetts psychiatrist Dr. Frank Clevenger, who is haunted by an encounter two years earlier with a maniacal mental patient (described in grisly detail in Ablow’s Projection). This shattering experience has left him weary and disillusioned. Wanting to keep his distance from violence and death, he has sworn off consulting on forensic cases.

Clevenger, a victim of childhood abuse, is a complex character. His list of excesses, including smoking, gambling, drugs, alcohol and rescuing troubled women, could fill a textbook. Attempting to stay sober and sane, he substitutes coffee and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle for scotch and cocaine. Never married, his choices in women are questionable, running the gamut from society damsels-in-distress to disrobed dames in seedy strip clubs. Can Clevenger keep his own demons at bay while helping others deal with theirs? Enter the wealthy, socially prominent, politically powerful and profoundly dysfunctional Bishop family of Nantucket. North Anderson, Nantucket’s chief of police, enlists Clevenger’s help when one of the Bishop’s twin babies is murdered. Against his better judgment, Clevenger is drawn into the murder investigation. Thus begins the first link in a violent chain of events as he delves deeper into the Bishop family’s disturbing secrets. He risks everything to confront the evil side of human nature. How far can you walk in darkness without losing your way forever? Frank Clevenger is about to find out. Compulsion allows us to explore Frank’s psyche, as well as those of the characters he encounters as he attempts to match wits with a psychopath. The protagonist is flawed but driven to deliver justice; the villain is suitably frightening. Ablow’s strong characterizations extend to the supporting cast, who are just as complicated and entertaining. The author, a practicing forensic psychiatrist, uses his extensive knowledge of mental illness and violence to lend authenticity to Compulsion, weaving a suspenseful mystery around riveting insights into the criminal mind. This latest addition to the Frank Clevenger series is an engrossing thriller that belongs on your summer reading list. C.

L. Ross reads, writes and reviews in Pismo Beach, California.

As Keith Ablow's Compulsion opens, we meet Massachusetts psychiatrist Dr. Frank Clevenger, who is haunted by an encounter two years earlier with a maniacal mental patient (described in grisly detail in Ablow's Projection). This shattering experience has left him weary and disillusioned. Wanting to keep…
Fiction

Hellenga weaves an enlightening tale

Review by bookpagedev

Sixty-year-old Rudy Harrington is a man searching for answers. His wife Helen has been dead for seven years, but he’s still haunted by the affair she had while teaching college art students in Italy. He’s restless in his longtime job as a produce broker, and struggles to forge adult relationships with his three grown daughters. Rudy’s decision to buy an avocado grove and move from Chicago to the dusty Texas-Mexico border to run it opens the door to the strange and wonderful events recounted in this charming novel.

Robert Hellenga’s fourth novel gracefully tells the story of a man seeking ultimate meaning amid the mundane events of daily life. Happily, Philosophy Made Simple is anything but an introspective or pedantic work. In it, readers will meet an engaging cast of characters (featuring some introduced in Hellenga’s first novel, The Sixteen Pleasures) that includes a prickly Hindu holy man, a kindly Mexican flower shop owner who provides professional companionship to middle-aged men, and a gentle elephant named Norma Jean. The novel’s central action revolves around the obstacles that confront Rudy as he tries to stage a traditional Hindu wedding in Texas for his daughter Molly and her Indian fiancŽ. Along the way, Hellenga unobtrusively enlightens his audience on subjects as diverse as avocado growing, Hindu wedding customs, the eating habits of elephants and the fundamental teachings of great Western philosophers. In Hellenga’s able hands the slightly off-kilter world he’s created is completely plausible. Although he writes with an often comic sensibility, he’s never less than sympathetic to his characters, and their interaction skillfully illumines some of the issues that have puzzled both philosophers and ordinary people since the first human being asked: why am I here? Philosophy Made Simple is a wry and gentle look at one man’s search for the meaning of his life. Readers will be enchanted by Rudy’s story, and if they’re on a quest like his, they shouldn’t be surprised to find a tidbit or two that may help light their way. Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Sixty-year-old Rudy Harrington is a man searching for answers. His wife Helen has been dead for seven years, but he's still haunted by the affair she had while teaching college art students in Italy. He's restless in his longtime job as a produce broker, and…
Fiction

Family ties and poetic suspense

Review by bookpagedev

So, you think your family is difficult? Meet the Smallwoods. Georgie, the narrator of Lynn Hightower’s latest novel, has never shaken the scandal she caused in the small, picturesque town of Beaufort, South Carolina, by having a child out of wedlock at age 16. Her son, Hank, ran away from home at 15, and she has searched high and low for him for two years. Her brother Ashby long ago saw his dreams of a successful business career dashed by severe dyslexia. Now making his living as a shrimper, he is the only person in the family content in a relationship with Reese, a former football player. Everyone loves sister Claire except her husband, whom she has finally turned out after a loveless decade of marriage. Then there are the parents: Fielding Smallwood is a bitter, brutal man, an ex-marine whose command decision years earlier resulted in the death of seven young men in training, forcing him to leave the branch of service he loved. And Lena, the beloved matriarch of this family, has put up with Fielding only because she has long been having an affair with the Beaufort chief of police. Fielding and Lena make only brief appearances in the novel, but their presence is felt long after their untimely and highly suspicious deaths, one after the other.

Out of such tangled family ties, Hightower could have fashioned a black comedy instead of a suspense novel. However, what she has written has the lyrical quality of literature. She finds the poignancy of a family turned against itself in the stifling and frequently suffocating confines of a southern coastal tourist town. She concentrates not on the difficulties that separate these characters, but on the ways they are bound together and indelibly imprinted on each other, making their complicated lives seem entirely real. Hightower’s use of flashbacks in which Georgie recalls some particular childhood memory elucidates Georgie’s point of view, but also moves the story along, in the same way that the past always helps make sense of the present. The book does not sacrifice beauty of language to plot; the two serve each other well. Who would think a suspense thriller could be poetic? None of this comes as a surprise when one realizes that Hightower studied with the poet Wendell Berry at the University of Kentucky. The author of six previous novels, including Satan’s Lambs, which won the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel, Hightower’s abilities as a storyteller are amply evident in this tale of a southern family united by one death and ripped apart by another. Bonnie Arant Ertelt is a writer living in Nashville.

So, you think your family is difficult? Meet the Smallwoods. Georgie, the narrator of Lynn Hightower's latest novel, has never shaken the scandal she caused in the small, picturesque town of Beaufort, South Carolina, by having a child out of wedlock at age 16. Her…
FictionWomen's Fiction

You can’t go home again

Review by bookpagedev

Edie Boyd’s three children are finally grown and living on their own. She should be thrilled, but instead finds herself mooning around her too-quiet, too-tidy house on the verge of a serious funk. On the other hand, Russell Boyd (who loves their children just as much) is exhilarated by the luxury of finally having his wife to himself.

But before you can say "empty nest," the Boyd offspring begin making their way back home. First it’s eldest son Matthew, whose longtime girlfriend buys a fancy apartment that he can’t afford to share. Then Rosa loses her job and her place to stay, neither of which she cared for anyway. And somewhere in there, Edie takes in the vulnerable young co-star from the play in which she’s appearing. Youngest son Ben has moved in with his girlfriend and her mother, but it seems only a matter of time before he’s home, too. Suddenly, the house is once again filled to the rafters, and Edie is left wondering if perhaps she should be more careful what she asks for.

Joanna Trollope’s Second Honeymoon is another wonderful dispatch from the British novelist, who reports from the front line of home and family like no one else. Trollope manages, book after book, to keep her unique take on modern living not just fresh, but intriguing. She is at her most sublime when writing about the most conventional details of and musings on daily life. Consider Edie’s meditation on, of all things, eating breakfast: "He ate like Ben, with that peculiar combination of indifference and absorption that seemed to characterize hungry young men, consuming two bowls of cereal and a banana and four slices of toast as if they were simultaneously vital and of no consequence at all." 

Second Honeymoon is Trollope at her very best: precise and engaging. In true Trollope fashion, she crafts a story filled with surprises, nothing like what you’d hoped it would be. Somehow, it’s better.
 
Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.
 
RELATED CONTENT
Read reviews of Joanna Trollope’s Girl from the South and Next of Kin.

 

 

Edie Boyd's three children are finally grown and living on their own. She should be thrilled, but instead finds herself mooning around her too-quiet, too-tidy house on the verge of a serious funk. On the other hand, Russell Boyd (who loves their children just as…

Memoir

Growing up in the Bronx badlands

Review by bookpagedev

Jerome Charyn’s Bronx is a landscape of magic and passion. It’s the Bronx of the late 1940s and early ’50s, a place as vivid as Twain’s Hannibal or Garcia Marquez’s Macondo. With its Yiddish syntax, American yearning and stage full of unforgettable characters, Bronx Boy concludes the trilogy about the borough that Charyn began back in 1997 with The Dark Lady from Belorusse. That memoir, as well as its sequel The Black Swan, has the same unmistakable blend of mystery and eccentricity as the new volume, and all teem with convincing details of ordinary life in the badlands of New York City. If Norman Mailer had written Bronx Boy, he would have probably subtitled it memoir as novel/novel as memoir, for, as Charyn himself says in a note at the end of the narrative, this is an imaginative re-creation, often not intended to portray historical characters, places and events. A memoir of his junior high school years, Bronx Boy is actually a collection of surreal anecdotes framed by the voice and vision of the 13-year-old narrator, Baby Charyn.

The life Baby Charyn lives in the Bronx is an exciting one, to be sure. His gang is called the Bronx Boys, and their politics is the democracy of the candy store. Intelligence, talent and charisma are the ways to rise in such a place, and Baby Charyn has them all. He wins a contest for soda jerks sponsored by the gangster Meyer Lansky, becoming in the process the aide-de-camp of Sarah Dove, a beautiful drug addict and prostitute. He also becomes the main attraction at a roadhouse in New Jersey, a place that sits on stilts on the edge of the Palisades. The owner of the roadhouse, reminiscent of Jay Gatsby, is a hero of the badlands named Will Scarlet, a prince of thieves, but a man whom the narrator understands will disappoint me one day . . . as fickle and destructive as any prince of chaos. Will Scarlet is a gangster but not like Meyer Lansky, who calculates every move like a chess master. As Baby Charyn sees it, Will Scarlet had that Bronx disease: a deadly passion that created windstorms wherever he went. I lived inside that wind. It’s a dark wind of fantasy and nightmare that the narrator lives within a windstorm that shapes a dreamscape of beautifully surreal characters like Miranda, the six-foot-tall gang leader who has sex with Charyn in the hallway of her apartment while her blind grandmother sits nearby asking, What’s that noise? Miranda argues like Socrates and makes love like Emma Bovary. And she can fight like an Amazon. Any story of the modern Bronx is a narrative of warfare, and Charyn’s is no exception: And so we went to war. It wasn’t the Montagues and the Capulets, with their long knives and pretty words. It was the badlands, not the rich town of Verona. And I wasn’t heir to any fortune. I was a Bronx boy by way of Belorusse. We bivouacked at the candy store until Smooth Malone arrived with Lansky’s gorillas, carrying baseball bats Joe Dimaggio specials, with the Clipper’s signature burnt into the wood. Any story of the Bronx in the second half of the 20th century also centers upon the archetypal tale of escape. It is Dr. Baron, a one-time successful novelist turned English teacher at Ridder High School, who points the way for the narrator. He meets Charyn on the roof of the school to share his wisdom. A failed Dostoyevsky who cannot escape the Bronx, Dr. Baron gives Charyn the advice that is the thematic heart of all books about the district: Become a gardener, a hobo, a crook, but run, Baby, run. This is the story of the Bronx: escape or die.

Charyn escaped to tell the tale. And a wonderful one it is, crowded with egg creams and bar mitzvahs, gang wars and ghosts, stories and storytellers. A scion of Meyer Lansky and Flaubert, Charyn, in the end, is a Bronx boy with a blue feather as his pistol and his pen. Bronx native Dr. Michael Pearson directs the creative writing program at Old Dominion University.

 

Jerome Charyn's Bronx is a landscape of magic and passion. It's the Bronx of the late 1940s and early '50s, a place as vivid as Twain's Hannibal or Garcia Marquez's Macondo. With its Yiddish syntax, American yearning and stage full of unforgettable characters, Bronx…

Fiction

Finding her way

Review by bookpagedev

Cindy Dyson is a journalist who has written eight young adult novels. In And She Was, her first adult novel, Dyson calls upon her experience growing up in Alaska and successfully interweaves past and present in an engrossing story. It is 1986 and Brandy, named after the drink, is a blonde, trashy cocktail waitress incapable of making a life choice that does not involve following a man somewhere. At 31 years old, Brandy finds herself still doing what she knows best: she is headed to a remote Aleutian Island to meet her latest fling, Thad, a fisherman. While Thad is at sea, Brandy works at a dive bar and deadens her constant apathy by mixing cocaine and alcohol. Soon enough, Brandy becomes ensnared by the mysteries and tragedies of the island that have been hidden for 250 years. Through uncovering those secrets, Brandy is forced to become someone she never knew she could be: a strong woman in control of her destiny, who no longer needs to follow. Marisa Birns is a writer in New York City.

Cindy Dyson is a journalist who has written eight young adult novels. In And She Was, her first adult novel, Dyson calls upon her experience growing up in Alaska and successfully interweaves past and present in an engrossing story. It is 1986 and Brandy, named…
Fiction

Zippy’ author goes home again

Review by bookpagedev

<B>Zippy’ author goes home again</B> Reeling from a failed romance, Langston Haverman ditches her Ph.

D. oral exams walking right out of the culmination of a decade of schooling. She returns to her parents’ home in rural Haddington, Indiana, just in time for the funeral of her childhood friend Alice. She refuses to hear the circumstances of Alice’s death, convincing herself that cancer, not horrific violence, claimed her friend’s life and left her two young daughters orphaned.

But then, Langston is the master of avoidance. Almost 30, she has never even asked her parents about her own name, the literary scholar in her cringing at the possibility that they co-opted the name of a brilliant Harlem Renaissance poet for their white baby girl. She shuns friendship and most of the inhabitants of Haddington, including the strangely appealing local minister, Amos Townsend, who tries to befriend her.

What really happened to Alice, and the consequences that arise from her death, is the basis of Haven Kimmel’s immensely powerful debut novel, <B>The Solace of Leaving Early</B>. Kimmel’s delicious 2001 memoir <I>A Girl Named Zippy</I> detailed her own Indiana upbringing and proved her skill at capturing the quirks of small-town America. From the local gossips dishing at the diner to the grouchy waitress pouring their coffee, Kimmel deftly populates her new story with colorful and believable characters.

Out of school and out of work, Langston is placed in charge of Alice’s traumatized daughters, who claim to talk with the Virgin Mary via a dogwood tree in their grandmother’s backyard. Driving the girls to their daily therapy sessions is a far cry from Langston’s imagined future as a professor on some prestigious campus. Amos tries to help, but he’s wrestling with his own spiritual doubts in the wake of Alice’s death, which he couldn’t prevent even as he saw it coming.

Equal parts heartbreak and hilarity (witness the misplaced Langston trying to order an organic breakfast from an eggs-and-bacon-slinging waitress), <B>The Solace of Leaving Early</B> is a beautiful meditation on what it means to be home, and how home can be found in the most unexpected places. <I>Amy Scribner writes from Washington, D.C.</I>

<B>Zippy' author goes home again</B> Reeling from a failed romance, Langston Haverman ditches her Ph.

D. oral exams walking right out of the culmination of a decade of schooling. She returns to her parents' home in rural Haddington, Indiana, just in time for the…

Children's & YA

A folk song inspires a fun story

Review by bookpagedev

Was It a Good Trade? is a lively volume that practically dances right off the bookshelf. First published in 1956, the book, which is based on a folk song, has been reissued with new artwork by Irene Haas, the original illustrator. The whimsical tale begins with a man who says, “I had a little knife, I traded for a wife.” He keeps on trading throughout, swapping the cake his wife bakes for a rake, then a shoe, then a slate, then a cat, and so on, until he finally gets his knife back and announces “I’m through with trading.” Preschoolers will revel in the sequence of trades, often quite humorous (one involves a whale), and at the end they can sing along the folk song and music are included in the book. What truly makes this silly tune come to life are Irene Haas’ lively illustrations, all focused on the main character. She portrays the trader as a cute, avuncular, bald fellow with glasses and a hat, both of which constantly fall off, get twisted or fly through the air. Haas enlivens his Tigger-like antics he practically bounces along on each page with his amusing expressions, ranging from sheer happiness to befuddlement whenever he fears a trade has gone sour.

De Regniers, who studied dance and theater, and whose May I Bring a Friend? won a Caldecott, once wrote, “It’s no accident, I think, that when I write books I think of choreography. That is, the story and pictures must have a pace and pattern.” No doubt de Regniers would heartily approve of Haas’ latest lilting, prancing illustrations. The book is wider than it is tall, giving this “trading-up” fellow plenty of room to prance through the pages as he endlessly searches for something better. His tale concludes on a reassuring note of satisfaction: “So now I have my little knife/my little wife/and I will keep them all my life. . . . ” However, once a trader, always a trader, so our hero soon sheepishly inquires, “Well . . . what’ve you got to trade?” If all else fails, simply turn to the front and start trading again.

Was It a Good Trade? is a lively volume that practically dances right off the bookshelf. First published in 1956, the book, which is based on a folk song, has been reissued with new artwork by Irene Haas, the original illustrator. The whimsical tale begins…
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Racing to stop a deadly epidemic

Review by bookpagedev

Joshua Spanogle’s debut novel will have readers compulsively washing their hands for months. A medical student at Stanford, Spanogle knows his subject, and the result is a chillingly realistic medical thriller with real urgency.

Isolation Ward opens as a mysterious outbreak of hemorrhagic fever strikes a run-down hospital in a decaying Baltimore neighborhood. The early symptoms of the viral infection resemble a bad case of the flu but quickly escalate to something much more horrific and an alarming percentage of those infected are dead within weeks. Dr. Nathaniel McCormick, a hard-charging medical detective from the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control, is called in to investigate. What he uncovers is shocking: all those inflicted with the sickness are mentally handicapped residents from group homes in the area, and all have sexual links with another group home resident, an alleged rapist named Douglas Buchanan. McCormick’s investigatory style, which can best be described as antagonistic, leads him to some surprising clues, but his complete lack of couth gets him pulled from the front lines just as possible leads start surfacing. After being shipped off to California to follow up on a minor loose end, McCormick finds himself right in the middle of a jaw-dropping plot that could save millions of lives and destroy even more.

Readers will have a hard time putting down this incredibly fast-paced novel and will be disturbed by its far-reaching implications, but a minor flaw can be found in its protagonist, the ill-tempered and overly sarcastic McCormick. An unpleasant blend of loud-mouthed brat and insensitive know-it-all, the headstrong character is not always an easy one for readers to identify with. That small criticism aside, Isolation Ward is definitely a medical thriller worth reading. Paul Goat Allen is a freelance editor and writer in Camillus, New York.

Joshua Spanogle's debut novel will have readers compulsively washing their hands for months. A medical student at Stanford, Spanogle knows his subject, and the result is a chillingly realistic medical thriller with real urgency.

Isolation Ward opens as a mysterious outbreak of hemorrhagic…
Fiction

Of mice and men

Review by bookpagedev

At a moment when much attention is being given to truth and accuracy, or the lack thereof, in writing, Allegra Goodman’s latest novel is a timely exploration of the importance of both and a reminder that each can come at a price. Set in the rigorous and high-stakes world of cancer research, Intuition rests on the premise that most things that appear too good to be true most likely are. In an intriguing twist, Goodman explores how this premise can apply to the quest for the truth itself, with some unexpected results.

At the Philpott Institute, the cancer research lab has not had a standout study in some time, much to the frustration of the head scientists. All that changes when the mice in Cliff Bannaker’s experiment begin responding to his test drug. As repeated tests bear similar success, the excitement crescendos from thoughts of potential grant money to publications in medical journals to an imminent miracle cancer drug. Amid the uncharacteristic giddiness, however, Cliff’s colleague and former girlfriend, Robin Decker, begins to think that something is amiss. Unable to successfully reproduce the experiments herself, Robin begins to wonder whether Cliff’s results are perhaps a bit too good.

For those in charge at the Philpott Institute, however, passing over Robin’s charges proves quite simple: they’re awed by the possibilities of Cliff’s findings and more than a little skeptical of Robin’s motives. Robin, however, refuses to disappear without a fight. As the stakes get higher, the lines between right and wrong, and subsequently true and false, become increasingly harder to distinguish. Goodman masterfully structures her story, accomplishing the rare achievement of presenting characters possessing disparate views with even-handed power. She allows the suspense to build until the unexpected resolution and, in doing so, explores both the power and cost of truth and, ultimately, its betrayal. Meredith McGuire writes from San Francisco.

At a moment when much attention is being given to truth and accuracy, or the lack thereof, in writing, Allegra Goodman's latest novel is a timely exploration of the importance of both and a reminder that each can come at a price. Set in the…
Children's & YA

Charming library tale is long overdue

Review by bookpagedev

Do you remember when you got your first library card? I can remember the day my mother presented me with mine. I was on top of the world! The thought of being able to go to the library and pick out any book (and be held accountable for it) was my first lesson in responsibility. Beverly Billingsly Borrows a Book, a new picture book from Alexander Stadler, perfectly captures the wonder of those early trips to the library, portraying the joy of discovery all beginning readers experience.

The story follows young Beverly an adorable little furry gray animal as she receives her first library card from the Piedmont Public Library and checks out her first book. Due date: April 7. But Beverly is transfixed by her book about dinosaurs and can’t put it down. As the weeks go by, she realizes she has gone past the due date. Not sure about what happens to a patron who does not return books on time, she asks for the advice of friends. One tells her she’ll have to pay thousands of dollars; another tells her that she’ll get sent to jail. Because of these horrible tidings, Beverly decides not to go to the library at all. But after a nightmare concerning the librarian, she tells her mother about her crisis and returns the book (without going to jail), making a new friend as a result. Stadler’s fantastic watercolor illustrations add humor to the storyline. The book is filled with priceless images: the bird-like librarian, Mrs. Del Rubio, with glasses perched atop her beak; Beverly’s nightgown covered with the words “April 7,” the dreaded due date. Another unforgettable illustration is the picture of Beverly’s friend Carlton Chlomsky eating a carrot. Readers will most definitely chuckle at the sight of him.

A textile designer from Pennsylvania, Stadler does a wonderful job of capturing the mindset of children. His book is a testament to the joys of reading, a reminder to youngsters that going to the library can be exciting and fun, not just educational! Karen Van Valkenburg is a book publicist in Michigan and an avid library-goer.

Do you remember when you got your first library card? I can remember the day my mother presented me with mine. I was on top of the world! The thought of being able to go to the library and pick out any book (and be…
Graphic Novels & Comics

Two sexy superheroes

Review by bookpagedev

Other than a penchant for capes and black masks and a talent for getting on Batman’s nerves Batgirl and Catwoman might not seem to have much in common. But in at least one sense, they fight on the same side: both were among the earliest female superheroes. It’s easy to imagine the influence these two powerful female role models must have wielded over their young audience. Now, the heroic contributions of Batgirl and Catwoman are celebrated in two separate retrospectives. From DC Comics, there’s Batgirl: Year One ($17.95, 224 pages, ISBN 140120080X), in which we learn how the feisty daughter of Commissioner Gordon Batman’s begrudging pal in the fight against crime became, almost by accident, a superhero in her own right. The book, written by Scott Beatty and Chuck Dixon and illustrated by Marcos Martin and Alvaro Lopez, is a prime example of the classic superhero comic: the writing is strong and witty, but contains just enough cheese to satisfy, and the artwork is rich, brightly colored and impeccably drawn. It’s a great, fun read, and would make a nice replacement for a Sweet Valley High title on any girl’s bookshelf. Less a graphic novel than a coffee table book is Catwoman: The Visual Guide to the Femme Fatale, by Scott Beatty. Written with obvious love for the medium and its exclamation-point-ridden language, the book is a celebration of the various incarnations of Selina Kyle, a.k.a. Catwoman, from spurned secretary to jewel thief in furry suit to, well, Michelle Pfeiffer in lickable latex. Some great fight scenes and images of the uneasy romance between Catwoman and Batman are also included, reproduced in color panels.

Other than a penchant for capes and black masks and a talent for getting on Batman's nerves Batgirl and Catwoman might not seem to have much in common. But in at least one sense, they fight on the same side: both were among the…
FictionHistorical Fiction

Secrets and desire in the city of canals

Review by bookpagedev

Sarah Dunant, whose The Birth of Venus was my favorite book of 2004, returns to Italy with In the Company of the Courtesan. This time, the action begins in Rome in 1527. We’re in the company of Bucino, a most resourceful man dwarf, actor-juggler and business manager for Fiammetta Bianchini, a beautiful young courtesan. But the Second Sack of Rome sends the courtesan and her dwarf to her native Venice. It’s a city as strange and exotic to Bucino who abhors water as a shrewd, intelligent dwarf is to most Venetians. The pair arrive to find Fiammetta’s mother dead and her house in the care of a slovenly woman who soon disappears, along with the ruby they had counted on to finance Fiammetta’s entry into Venetian society. Fiammetta soon becomes dependent on the assistance of a blind healer called La Draga, a woman Bucino instinctively distrusts. But not long after the loss of their fortune, Bucino finds a way for himself and his lady to re-establish themselves, with a touch of bribery, a secret hidden in a book and a great deal of panache.

In the Company of the Courtesan portrays a vibrant city at a dangerous time, when religion and politics clashed, often with violence. The city squares, bridges and canals teem with trade and colorful characters. Fiammetta’s circle includes real-life historic figures, such as Aretino, who wrote both religious works and scandalous sonnets, and the painter Tiziano Vecellio, better known as Titian. In a delicious scene set in Tiziano’s studio, Dunant imagines Fiammetta as the subject of one of his most famous nudes. But while Fiammetta’s beauty and talents support their lifestyle, this is Bucino’s journey, the story of a man who can only maintain hard-won success by confronting everything he fears. Ultimately, this is a novel not about religious or social politics, but the secrets of the heart: how love can drive the smart and cunning to the brink of foolishness, and what happens when desire battles with contentment. Leslie Budewitz treasures a small collection of Venetian Murano glass earrings.

Sarah Dunant, whose The Birth of Venus was my favorite book of 2004, returns to Italy with In the Company of the Courtesan. This time, the action begins in Rome in 1527. We're in the company of Bucino, a most resourceful man dwarf, actor-juggler and…

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