This book and this one were side by side on my shelf for the past two years. Somehow, bugger and tougher books came and pushed them aside and they got lost behind newer acquisitions. I have finally read them both, back to back.

The Durrell book is a bit quirkier and more irreverent, whereas this one is more like some of the historical fiction I read as a teen that told the story with some embellishment and some romance, more in modern day parlance. I think Cross did an impressive amount of research. The fact that I found the story a little too pat, is my own fault, not hers. Horrible father, long suffering mother, daughter who shines at everything and would have been the ideal child had she not had ovaries...But Cross's Joan always lands on her feet (well-- except for one time in the flood of the Tiber, when she seems to have landed on her back-- no more or there's a spoiler there.)

As I wrote in the other journal:

My friend Fr Dennis would be appalled that I might even consider it to be historically based. But who is to say? The 800's were a long time ago and historical information or sources from that time are sketchy. To this day, the Catholic Church continues to deny Pope Joan's existence. Instead, the "legend" is said to be an invention of Protestant reformers. (Yet Joan supposedly lived hundreds of years before the Protestants' break from the Catholic church. And there's the church's institution of the so-called chair exam (sella stercoraria). Each newly elected Pope after Joan sat on the sella stercoraria (literally, dung seat), which was like a toilet seat (or birthing chair) so that his genitals could be examined to prove he was a guy. Why start this new requirement if there had not been a need to? (I think the practice has been abandoned in modern day.)

I shall offer this to the person who I first heard about the book from (it's not on her shelf) along with the Durrell one. If she doesn't want it, I may offer it up on the forum or wild release it.

To the finder of this book:

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I Loved this book!! Everyone shoudl read it!! I am re releasing it into the wild in teh same place I found it - muddy waters!

muddy waters!