Tag: dunant

Authors Answer #18:  Have you ever wanted to rewrite the ending of another author’s published book? How would you change it?

Authors Answer #18: Have you ever wanted to rewrite the ending of another author’s published book? How would you change it?

Wow, long time since I did one of these! The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant There are very few books that get me so mad that I want to throw them across the room, but this is one of them. The author wrote a perfect historical romance, well-written, well-researched, the era brilliantly conveyed and the characters fascinating. She then destroyed it utterly by bookending it with a prologue and last chapter which turned it into something else altogether. I suppose the intention was to elevate the book from the realms of mere romance to historical fiction or even literature, and I daresay for many, possibly most, readers that worked fine. My book group, for instance, for whom this was a monthly pick, liked it well enough and most saw nothing wrong with the ending. But for me, it ruined the whole story. It took a main character who had, […]

Posted December 2, 2016 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer / 0 Comments

Historical fiction review: ‘The Birth of Venus’ by Sarah Dunant

Historical fiction review: ‘The Birth of Venus’ by Sarah Dunant

I loved this book. Right up until the very last chapter, I loved it. And then… if I hadn’t been reading on my Kindle, I’d have hurled the thing across the room. Ack. I can’t talk about the reasons for this without giving away spoilers, so if you don’t want to know anything, don’t read the second half of this review. Here’s the premise: fourteen-year-old Alessandra is the oddball of her fifteenth century Florence family. She’s not beautiful, as her sister and two brothers are, she’s not content to follow the prescribed duty for a well-to-do woman and either marry and push out babies, or take herself to a nunnery, she’s been educated and she has artistic talent. Her drawing is a secret, abetted by her slave maid, Erila. She yearns for freedom, but is constrained by the need to remain virginal. But when her father employs a painter from […]

Posted October 27, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 3 Comments