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.

I really love this book. I have an unregistered personal copy that I've read twice. I got this copy specifically so that I could share it through BookCrossing.

Yankee Book Swap #10

Well! This book has caused me a bit of trouble, but in a funny way! :) First I had already bought it for our Miss February Recipient in the Book-a-holics group because it was on her wishlist. Almost the next day, another copy was in a swap, and I had to steal it out of play so I could send her mine! LOL!! Then I bought another one for my secret cupid! But at least, here is my own new copy from Morsie to actually read, since I've bought it twice, and had to send them both away! LOL!! Too funny!

Thanks Morsie!

And after all that (in the previous entry) they never arrived! *cry*

So, Book-o-holics February package for Girakittie, take two! This time, we're going delivery confirmation darnit! LOL!

Hope you enjoy La Kittie, we miss you around the relay forum!

awww. I feel so loved. Thank you Shauney dear for this lovely practically new copy and also for the unregistered!!! Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn. You are totally the sweetest. Hugs and loves to all of you over at BR. :)

OH! And Hi Miss Morsie, too. :)