Amazon Editorial Review

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities.

But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art.

The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.


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Sarah Dunant's "The Birth of Venus" feels similar to Tracy Chevalier's "Girl With a Pearl Earring."

However, "The Birth of Venus" isn't based on the Botticelli masterpiece that still resides in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It's based on the metaphorical "birth" -- and transformation -- of a girl-turned-woman whose single-mindedness is constantly thwarted by actions which force her to conform to 15th century Florentine society.

I'm not big on novels associated with the feminist school of thought that suggests forbidden romance, in all of its forms, brings liberation. Yet I was blindsided by Dunant's "The Birth of Venus" - especially its ending. It is a rebellious story.

The author goes out of her way to spin a fictional tale that's rooted in well-researched, historical reality.
One of the problems in the book is the use of modern slang occasionally surfaces. Another is the erotic passages which could have been left out.

Suspending disbelief is obviously required when great figures creep into a novel.
I wished Dunant had stopped there. Instead, she plows ahead with the inevitable "scene" that would've been better suggested than described in a way that feels a little forced, posed and "artsy." I became aware of Dunant's writing. And this isn't supposed to happen. A great story is supposed to make you less conscious of great prose.

Enjoy! For The "THE" Release Challenge 2016