Book Review: Babylonia by Constanza Casati

Imagining the life of a historical figure whose life has been imagined and reimagined far more than the actual historical facts about her: Semiramis.

A young woman, in a nowhere town at the edges of Empire, daughter of a mother who has killed herself, living under the house of a father who can’t wait to marry her off and get rid of her, a young woman who dreams of a better life. But when her theft of a murdered governor’s rings brings her to the attention of a court official come to replace him, the young woman has a chance to not only escape her common life, but to transcend it entirely.

The book is Babylonia, by Constanza Casati.

This is Casati’s version of the story of Semiramis. Constanza Casati, known for her previous novel detailing the life of Clytemnestra, takes a further step toward historical fiction with this novel. What we know about the actual Semiramis as a historical character with attested resources is pretty thin, to be honest. We know there was a woman whom Semiramis was based on, with some authority in the otherwise fiercely patriarchal Neo-Assyrian Empire of the 8th century BC.

But beyond that and a few inscriptions, there is only a small amount of factual evidence about the real person behind Semiramis. So what Casati does here is invent out of whole cloth (but with a rigorous look at Neo-Assyrian Empire life and culture and society as far as we know them) a commoner background for Semiramis, trying to improve her life by any and all means, convinced she has a better destiny. I am reminded of Alma Alexander’s heroine Calladora (from her novel Empress) based on the Byzantine Empress Theodora, who likewise was convinced she had a better destiny than the common life she was born into. Casati’s invented Semiramis is right in Calladora’s mold.

But given the lack of actual facts of Semiramis’ life, what Casati does do is to fold in the heavy mythic tradition that Semiramis has accumulated around herself, far more than the actual historical record. It is Casati’s own thesis in the book that the strange event of a Queen on the Neo-Assyrian throne had an afterlife far beyond the historical record itself, inspiring a lot of authors, including right in the Classical era, to start inventing aspects of her life.

Diodorus Siculus is our main culprit here and our main ur-text for traditions on Semiramis, although the mythmaking on her began centuries earlier. He collects a lot of the myths, especially her superhuman ones, and medieval and later writers, knowingly or not, owe a debt to him. But really, once you start digging and getting interested, she is a historical personage that doesn’t have a lot of real facts about her.

Casati uses this mythology about Semiramis, in the same way she did with the Homeric tradition as well as Greek plays and myths in Clytemnestra. Just like that previous novel, she keeps the focus on realism, with no fantastic elements whatsoever, but immerses the narrative in a world where fantastic elements are accepted as part of everyday life. Take Semiramis' mother Derecto, who kills herself at the beginning of the book, abandoning her child. In the novel, she’s an ordinary mortal and distraught woman. In the mythic sources above, she’s a river goddess, or a water goddess or otherwise semi-divine, (and thus so is Semiramis). And in the narrative of the novel itself, especially as she rises to power, these myths come to be believed by people. The novel is not just the rise of Semiramis’ power and position and prestige, it is the very story of how the myths were shaped to begin with, how the pieces and inspirations for those myths were constructed.

But there is also a relationship triangle here that Casati takes from one of these mythic romances and remakes as her own. The points of view (with a few exceptions) bounce between Semiramis, Onnes, the “new governor” who brings her to the palace, and Ninus, the King of Assyria. A lot of the middle and end of the book is the tensions between these three characters as they resolve their feelings for each other, or at least come to terms to admit them. Given that this is a strongly patriarchal society with very strict laws, mores, and customs, this does not go well and provides a lot of the meaty drama as Semiramis tries to survive and thrive in a strongly patriarchal court.

Besides these, the most fearsome, ferocious and off-the-page character doesn’t get a point of view, and that is Ninat. Ninat is the queen mother, mother to the current king, wife of the king’s father (Shalmaneser) and is a ruthless and determined political operator and a survivor. In what is the very epitome of a “deadly decadent court” of intrigue, Ninat has survived and even thrived. She does not take the arrival of Semiramis well at all, as well as she might. She is barely controlling her son as it is at the moment and the arrival of Semiramis is a destabilizing factor that she cannot afford. We don’t get a point of view from her, which is a conflicting choice in my thinking. I would like to really know what she is thinking, given her adversarial role toward all of the characters that we do get a perspective of.

One gripe I have is with the title of the book. Babylonia: A Novel. If I told you nothing else about the book, what would you think the book was actually about, or who it was about. I, who have a modest general knowledge of ancient history, would not have guessed Semiramis as any of a dozen guesses. The historical Semiramis (Shammuramat, which is the Queen name that Semiramis takes by the end of the book upon her ascension) has no real connection to Babylon.

The mythic sources mentioned earlier have Semiramis doing everything and anything, including having her name on one of the gates of Babylon (Herodotus, predictably). But Babylon is never the focus of her wide ranging adventures, exploits and rule. And in the novel itself aside from Semiramis’ encounters and confrontations with a prince of Babylon, Marduk, Semiramis in the novel itself neither visits nor has any real connection to Babylon at all. When she gets crowned Queen, she is crowned Queen of Assyria and Queen of Babylon but that is really an afterthought and due to circumstances, not any real tie to the place.

There is one exception to all this, that might explain it and it is part of the Semiramis mythic literature I have not mentioned as yet. “The Whore of Babylon” is a mid 19th century text by a minister, Christopher Hislop, a religious anti-Catholic pamphlet that mixes, matches and invents a lot of Near Eastern history and mythology together to “prove” that the Catholic church is actually a polytheistic descendant of Babylonian religion. In the course of this, Semiramis is the titular Whore of Babylon and (somehow) is responsible for Goddess worship, which explains devotion to the Virgin Mary, et cetera.

So if I follow the title “Babylonia: A Novel”, it seems to be using memories of that pamphlet and its mischaracterization of Semiramis in order to come up with the book title. And I think it is an atrocious idea. For a novel that tries to reclaim Semiramis in a modern, and feminist sort of mold and story, and as we have seen in my review, does well at it, to revert to one of the more inventive and slanted and disgusting characterizations of someone we actually know very little about it is more than disappointing... it undercuts the actual project of the novel. It buries what you are trying to do with the book.

The novel is not meant to be a definitive entire life of Semiramis. The novel ends, basically, on her ascension as full Queen Regnant. Given that, again we know very little about the real Semiramis, who, like Clytemnestra (in the author’s previous work) is much more a character of myth than of actual fact, I am quite satisfied. In a touch that reminds me a bit of works like I, Claudius, we even get a strong implication at the end as to who is telling us this story, and given their thread through the book, you will not be surprised. It makes a lot of sense.

So what Casati does in the novel, ultimately, is not terribly different than what she does in Clytemnestra but is an extension of the same. There are more historical facts behind the person that the semi-mythical Semiramis is based on (Shammuramat) but there is so little that Casati is even freer in her invention that she was with Clytemnestra. There are definite parallels between her Clytemnestra and Semiramis (one could say that, based on two novels, that the author clearly likes to write a type). After all, a line from Clytemnestra certainly does apply to Semiramis throughout to the end of the book: “Queens are either hated, or they are forgotten.” Semiramis, like Clytemnestra, knows which one she would rather be.

--  

Highlights:

• Non-fantastical Near Eastern story of a character who is mostly mythical

• Strong feminist story in a culture even more patriarchal than her last novel

• Some elements of the book, including the title, undercut author’s intentions

Reference: Casati, Constanza, Babylonia: A Novel, [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2025]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Book Review: The Witch of Prague by J.M. Sidorova

An intriguing magical realism novel set in the run up to the Prague Spring of 1968.

Alica is a dyslexic teenager in Czechoslovakia. She wants a better life than what her mean and often quite thin circumstances will allow. Answering an ad to learn how to type does teach her that, but opens her up to two worlds. One is a chance at a job within the Communist Party, putting her in the halls of power at a propitious time, and a chance to make a life for herself. The other world revolves around a tapestry. A unicorn tapestry, in fact. But this is not just any copy of the famous medieval work. This is a unicorn tapestry that has an interior world of its own for Alica to immerse herself in. An interior world of symbolism that connects to the real world that Alica is faced with. A world that shows that Alica can have and wield more power than she imagines.

This is the story of J.M. Sidorova’s The Witch of Prague.

Sidorova’s novel starts off, strongly and boldly as a historical fiction novel about a time and place that is likely to be unfamiliar to a lot of readers. The author immerses us in Alica’s life, allowing us to get used to what life in a Soviet satellite state on the cusp of a brief and vibrant change is life. Alica’s life is not a happy or easy one when we meet her--she is dyslexic (and only learns that thanks to her typing tutor). The privations, in freedom as well as goods, and quality of life in the time and place of Soviet Czechoslovakia is made clear, in large and small ways. And yet at the same time we get to see the brief cracks in the wall of Soviet control and domination of the country as music and other ideas are briefly and haltingly impinge on Alica. A movie director from Italy. Music from the Rolling Stones. Foods from beyond the Iron Curtain. These small details, these dollops of a world that might be, show the contrast of what the world is, and what it might be, for Alica, and the other denizens of Prague.

As a result, the novel quite effectively captures not just the place of Prague but the moment of the Prague Spring, its run up and its brief flowering. It is the fragilest of flowers, and it did not last, but we can see, through Alica’s story and her interactions, how that brief, beautiful flowering could and did happen. We see the dark and dank soil of the greyness and relentless nature of authoritarian Soviet Czechoslovakia, and then we see that grasping for the light, a grasping and a search for a different way of living. The writing of the novel is immersive, evocative, and a unique and strong voice. Alica makes for an engaging young protagonist as she tries to navigate her family, a potential romance, work colleagues and rivals. Also, Alica finds that benign a woman in a patriarchal authoritarian workforce is often a very dark place indeed to inhabit. The author does not soft pedal what is like for Alica in her job in a Government ministry as a young woman, and some incidents in the book can be uncomfortable to read.

The magical realism elements of the book enter slowly, a steady drip of the fantastic (or fantastika, in the Gary K. Wolfe sense of the word). This is a book I feel that fits his idea of “evaporating genres”, as the novel effortlessly uses its historical fiction chassis to inject the magical realism, but not really to the levels you might expect in an urban fantasy novel. It’s not that the magic isn’t quite real, but it can be quite subtle.

The magical realism relies on the aforementioned unicorn tapestry, which does turn out to have magical power, and Alica’s relationship (such as it is) with it, and with its power. Again, aside from Alica’s brief immersions into the “world” of the tapestry, the magic that we see her eventually be able to wield, through the tapestry, is quite light. But it is the symbolism and the use of the tapestry as metaphor and as a framework for understanding what is happening in the Prague Spring is where the novel shines. If you consider the story told in the Unicorn Tapestries, one can see analogues and parallels between the elements we see in the tapestry and the real world, and Alica is caught, as it were, in between these two worlds. She doesn’t understand or parse what the tapestry is telling her, but the metaphors and literary use of the tapestry is a commentary and a frame for readers to parse what is happening in Alica’s real life. And, inevitably, that commentary has things to say with the burgeoning Prague Spring, too.

As a reader who prefers more fantasy elements than not in a novel, sometimes this novel was a little too mimetic for my general taste--but the historical richness and the attention to detail and the immersion of place helped allay my concerns. The Prague Spring has, in my personal experience, been not much more than a phrase, and some dimly remembered and briefly covered events in High school and college history courses. My knowledge in general of life behind the Iron Curtain has been similarly just some bits I’ve picked up, as well as anecdotes from some friends and acquaintances who had dared to go there.

So, that aforementioned historical fictional detail really did, for me, make up for the sometimes very light touch on the fantasy. In a way, given the time, and distance, and the world having changed so much from now to then, The Prague of 1968 really is a “different country” than anything in the experience of a vast majority of potential readers. As a result, it is a look into a something uncomfortable, sometimes dark, but also a hopeful place. In the slow run up to the actual rush of events of the Prague Spring itself, the author engages us, carefully and in measured portions, of a world that could have been, an awakening that does not fully happen in the end. But part of the point of the book, as we look in the interior life of Alica and the world of the unicorn tapestry, as well as the events of the book, is that the fight, the brief window of resisting a seemingly unstoppable empire, is a fight that is worth having even if the victory is transitory and fleeting. It is worth it to carve out those brief moments of joy, those brief moments of reprieve. It is worth it to fight, even if the odds seem daunting, and even if the victories are small and do not immediately last.

The story of the Prague Spring, as filtered through magical realism in The Witch of Prague, is a story, then, that has strong resonance in a world where authoritarian forces are on the rise and are seeking to shut down dissent and resistance. It is a novel that is ostensibly magical realism historical fiction, but like a lot of fiction, it is a novel about today and a novel FOR today.

The Witch of Prague is currently being funded on Kickstarter.

--

Highlights:

• Magical realism novel with a light touch on the magic
• Strong historical fictional detail of Prague in a propitious time
• Strong use of symbolism and tie into its themes and ideas

Reference: J. M. Sidorova, The Witch of Prague, [Homeward Books, 2025 Kickstarter, 2026 General Release]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Anime Review: The Apothecary Diaries Season 2

Escalating drama, family secrets, disturbing themes, and increasing heat on the slow-burn romance

After a clever and addictive first season, it was no surprise that The Apothecary Diaries earned one of the coveted nomination slots for 2025 Anime of the Year. The first season introduced Mao Mao, a cynical genius apothecary in an ancient kingdom who gets kidnapped and sold into bondage as a servant in the harem of the imperial rear palace. Mao Mao’s foil in all of this is the gorgeous and clever eunuch Jinshi, who is in charge of the rear palace. Despite his swoon-inducing good looks, Jinshi is clever and clearly more than he appears to be, just as Mao Mao is more than she appears to be. In the first season, Mao Mao solved mysteries ranging from dying royal infants to dancing ghosts and mysterious murders. Both leading characters spend much of season 1 hiding who they really are while dealing with a relentless assassin and lots of palace intrigue.

In season 2, Jinshi is hunted by political assassins and Mao Mao is abducted during a clan insurrection and tasked with a heart-rending task while the safety of the nation is at risk. The new stakes are higher and the emotional investment is deeper, with a sinister conspiracy to overthrow the emperor, and revelations about the lead characters that will permanently change their relationship. Mao Mao is publicly revealed to be the secret daughter of the quirky genius and politically important clan leader, General LaKan. Similarly, Jinshi’s true identity, which was hinted at in the first season, is finally revealed to be Ka Zuigetsu, the Moon Prince, younger brother to the emperor.

While season 1 delivered a solid combination of a historical detective mystery, quirky opposites-attract personalities, hidden identities, lethal adventures, and lots of subversive feminist commentary, season 2 leans into the drama with upsetting sexual power dynamics, violent betrayals, profound family revelations, and an explosive uprising with far-reaching implications.

The Apothecary Diaries continues to use clever techniques to captivate viewers. For example, the show gives access to different characters’ points of view. As a result, in a given scene, the audience is often aware of more facts than one or both of the lead characters. This storytelling technique adds to the anticipation as each revelation occurs. In a recurring plot point, Jinshi’s repeated attempts to tell Mao Mao the truth about his identity become increasingly entertaining, especially since the audience knows a deeper level of truth about Jinshi than Jinshi does. Their fraught conversations are also funny because Mao Mao’s desire to avoid being drawn into drama makes her avoid engaging in things that will unnecessarily land her in trouble. In an iconic and awkward scene, she comes up with a particularly ridiculous explanation for a shocking truth she discovers about Jinshi. These early bits of humor soon give way to disturbing conversations and tragic events, making season 2 much less humorous and much more intense than season 1.

Season 2 also uses poignant flashbacks to provide a deeper understanding of the unusual personalities of the two protagonists. The new season focuses on Jinshi’s thwarted efforts to avoid both his destiny and his political role and also shows him being called to task by multiple characters for hiding his identity. However, we get an intriguing picture of his early childhood in the palace where everything (toys, people, pets) he shows particular love for is intentionally taken away from him to force him (as the potential future emperor) not to get attached to things he cares about. As a result, he grows up with a profound longing for attachment, and, although he is confirmed to be much younger than he purports to be (only nineteen years old), he is also emotionally immature, and at times clingy and jealous in relation to Mao Mao. However, consistent with his sharp intellect and secret royal status, he is also conversely shrewd, manipulative, focused, aggressive, and lethal.

As a servant, Mao Mao aggressively tries to avoid involvement in palace drama by internally denying or externally avoiding dangerous information. However, we also get a glimpse into her early childhood being raised in a busy brothel, where her cries were largely ignored until time permitted someone to attend to her. As a result, she grew to be stoic, self-reliant, and highly distrustful of relationships. In season 1, she is irritated by Jinshi and also annoyed by her gossipy fellow servant girl Xiaolan. However, in season 2, she is decidedly protective of Jinshi (but still distrustful of his advances). She also, ironically and reluctantly, finds herself drawn into an ill-fated friendship with the child-like fellow indentured maid, Xiaolan and the mysterious bug-loving newcomer Shisui. That tragic friendship, the fraught but addictive relationship between Jinshi and Mao Mao, the cruelty of the Shi Clan uprising, and Jinshi’s ascension to power politically and personally, make up the four primary pillars of season 2.

Overall, we have a feast of a fast-paced storytelling adventure with a dizzying array of family secrets, unexpected connections, and lots of revenge. All this intensity is balanced with quiet moments of meaningful character introspection, explorations of identity, and an examination of disturbing themes. In addition to the political intrigue, the show gives us an uncomfortable exploration of sexual power dynamics for those associated with the imperial palace. In one episode, the emperor flippantly suggests taking Mao Mao as a concubine to help him solve a restricted royal maze, which upsets both Mao Mao and Jinshi. Seeing their reaction, the emperor suggests Jinshi to claim her as concubine. As the season progresses, the show presents a disturbing backstory on the old emperor’s abuse of young girls who ultimately end up trapped in the rear palace forever. And we see the way his behavior is finally stopped by another disturbing act of revenge by the empress. The show also addresses war and its effect on the innocent, particularly children.

The slower, less traumatic episodes of an otherwise fast-paced season are not merely fillers but provide context and connections to characters whose lives are about to change dramatically in the subsequent, more intense episodes. Although the show still has elements of humor and avoids very graphic scenes, the themes and topics are clearly aimed at mature viewers. We also learn that many beloved characters are quite capable of harsh acts and violence. It is a fascinating contravention of expectations in a show that has had (and still has) moments of hilarity and classic anime-style humor.

Season 2 asks a lot of hard questions and offers less humor and playfulness than season 1. However, the exploration of difficult themes is worth it for viewers who want to see the intrigue and storytelling of season 1 expand and deepen rather than merely repeat itself. And we see the evolution of Jinshi and Mao Mao’s relationship and learn that, despite Jinshi’s ultimate power, it is Mao Mao who will determine the pace of their interactions. After a bold and clever first season, The Apothecary Diaries continues to push the boundaries of storytelling, identity, and social issues while still maintaining its core of intriguing characters. And, given its expansive source materials from numerous light novels and manga, there should be much more enjoyment and intrigue to come.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Drama, betrayals, and fast-paced adventure
• Disturbing and challenging themes
• Unique and intriguing storytelling

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Book Review: Blood of the Bull by Jo Graham

The third novel in the series takes Giulia and Rodrigo through a very rough patch in their relationship. Oh, and there’s a French Invasion too.

Jo Graham’s Memoirs of the Borgia Sybil series continues in this third book in the series. For those to catch up, Giulia Farnese, in this world next door, is not just the mistress of Rodrigo Borgia (aka Pope Alexander VI, the “Borgia Pope”), she has a connection to the spirit world that is exploited and used in book 1, A Blackened Mirror, and also in book 2, The Borgia Dove, where she is our viewpoint character to the infamous Papal Election of 1492. Now, not long has passed, it's near 1494 in fact, and Renaissance Italy is in turmoil. Not just because the French are invading, but the relationship between Giulia and Rodrigo has turned sour. Giulia finds out that the Bull (the symbol of the Borgias) is a literal metaphor, and the betrayal of what she thought was an exclusive relationship sets the pair at odds. Combine that with the French invasion, and you have the throughline for the story.

And therein, The Blood of the Bull, tells its tale. I am going to come to this story through a historical lens. This novel, like the second, is somewhat less focused on the supernatural elements of Giulia and her life and much more interested in the interpersonal dynamics of the pair. It takes a while for any real supernatural elements to come out of the woodwork. In the main, most of this novel, even more than the first two, is a richly done historical fiction novel. If the first novel was a coming of age story, and the second something of a mystery novel, this is more of a social conflict novel between Giulia and Rodrigo, with the French army as a leavening agent.

So, once again, we get Graham’s view of the Renaissance and its history. It is a considerably brighter view than some¹.As such, until Giulia leaves Rome after tempers flare between her and Rodrigo, we get the see the rich life of being the Pope’s mistress and how both Giulia and Rodrigo have to navigate it (we are, like the first two novels, always in Giulia’s point of view in the book). In our historical records, Giulia Farnese was one of the most powerful women in Rome with her relationship to the Pope, but not just for that. Graham makes it clear such a powerful woman has allies, clients, networks and in the course of a dangerous French invasion, Giulia needs all of them and they need here, and we get very much a social web. In a real way, Giulia is not just a partner to Rodrigo but an heir, a student, a pupil of him as well. And possibly the father of her child. The historical record is uncertain, but baby Laura, in the world of the novels is most definitely Rodrigo’s daughter. 

Having Giulia leave Rome when she discovers Rodrigo’s infidelity is an invention, as far as is well known in the historical records, she does not go off with Lucrezia and her new husband. This does give us a look at Italy outside of Rome for a while, especially with that looming threat of the French becoming a very real and potent danger as they move south. The threat of a seemingly unstoppable force, coming to erase all that she has come to treasure, is a real emotional button in the book that Graham presses well. 

Eventually the narrative joins the timeline we know again as Giulia goes to the estate of Capodimonte because her brother is dying. This happened in our timeline, but this story has Giulia go from Lucrezia’s estate to there, rather than from Rome, as what we know happened in history. We see Giulia at her most vulnerable and isolated here, feeling duty to her dying brother, and the strain of being apart from Rodrigo, and of course, the bloody French. The book keeps us in line with historical events when Giulia, heading back to Rome at last, is captured by a French officer, Yves d’Allegre, who ransoms her back to the Pope. Since we are only in Giulia’s point of view, we do not see the mysterious machinations directly that allowed Rome, and Pope Alexander VI’s papacy, not to be toppled by King Charles and his army. Graham does add a helping of her supernatural elements here to explain the motives and actions of some of the participants in this drama, and gives Giulia agency to oppose them.

The novel ends there, more or less, with Rome and the Papacy safe, Giulia and Rodrigo reunited, but the French are poised to rain down on Naples next. Interesting times are indeed what is in store for the next adventures of the Borgia Sybil. As always Graham is interested in the historical events and the allo-supernatural elements that help cause them to happen as they really did. Does this make her novels a magical secret history? Maybe! There is a little what-if speculation toward the end as Rodrigo’s fate is uncertain, and both Giulia and Rodrigo (but especially the magically talented Giulia) wonders if Rodrigo might have to be a sacrifice, a martyr, in the end. This ties nicely into the title Blood of the Bull. 

So who is this book for? Should you read this? Readers of the first two books is a rather flip answer, and that has the advantage of being true. I suppose you could start the series here, if you were really interested in this period of Italian history or wanted to get in on this series and did not want to read books one and two. But really this is a big narrative and a series that together forms a tapestry of a life (the choice of title Memoirs of the Borgia Sybil is a telling one).

But who is this series for, then? In general, if you want historical fiction with some supernatural elements that don’t change the history, and a strong sense and grounding in its point of view with a strong female protagonist (and other women as well). If you aren’t absolutely and resolutely anti-Borgia (and to be clear there is a case to have that point of view), then yes, this series may be your cup of tea. Graham is a hell of a writer and she is writing what she loves passionately about. It comes through with the intimacy she describes art in the papal apartments, the depth of feeling in her letters as she struggles with Rodrigos’ infidelity, with the blood and terror of the French invasion³. It’s here, should you want it.

--

Highlights:

• Strong historical fictional grounding
• Excellent use of female characters
• Amazing immersive look at Renaissance Italy
• Yet another spectacular cover for the series

Reference: Graham, Jo The Blood of the Bull, [Candlemark and Gleam 2025]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

¹ This is going to be a footnote of some length but it is a diversion from talking about the main subject of the novel itself and is not essential to that part of the book review, but it is an essential bit nevertheless. So this is more of a Pratchettian footnote than, say, a Vancean one. Graham’s view of the Renaissance, and perhaps the Borgias in particular, is far more positive and bright than, say, the recent Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, and reading this book after reading Palmer’s book was an interesting experience. I also in recent history have read Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization volume on these times. So I have gotten several runs through of the events of these times and perspectives of these times. Palmer’s thesis is the clearest because she says it on the tin “The Myth of a Golden Age”. She makes it clear time and again that in research and perspective, which is formidable, that the Renaissance was no golden age at all and in fact was not the greatest time and place to live in. From invasions to plagues to the vicissitudes of life in 15th century Italy, it was no golden age at all--even if its remnants and products make it seem so.

The whole project of the Renaissance, too and its history and it’s historification as a golden age is a matter of manipulating history. The Durants take a middle course, since they never go to primary sources. They are a product of their time and place, reading texts written mostly contemporary with themselves, so they have a more positive view of the events, and see the end of the Renaissance and the decline of Italy after the French Invasion and subsequent wars (spoiler, the French Invasion is just the beginning) as a tragedy that extinguished a turbulent but fecund period. Graham’s view is far far more positive, and takes lots of pains to show the light, the art, the vision that the humanist faction under Rodrigo (and to be fair, Giulia) want to bring. She sees those forces as fighting as war of light against dark (which melds into her grand supernatural conflict). 

So who is right? All of them! None of them! (as Palmer points out, history is an ever refining project, and our own views are going to be looked at with shaken heads a century or two from now). 

² In a conversation between myself and Graham, she compared Giulia and Rodrigo to Mystique and Magneto. And I definitely can see it, Mystique learning a lot at Magneto’s knee in the way of mutant and worldwide power politics, learning intrigue and manipulation and social graces and skills but applying them ultimately in her own way. And of course having a sometimes thorny relationship with her mentor as a lover. We didn’t see much in the way of the thorns in book 2, Graham reserved them for book 3. 

³ Maybe someone like H. Beam Piper or Poul Anderson never lived long enough, but surely, one could do a space opera version of the papal election of 1492 and the subsequent French invasion and make it a high SF drama. Such rich and interesting characters, times, and conflicts. It would be hellacious to research (reading these books and the aforementioned works by Palmer and the Durants might get you some of the way there) . Doing it as a fantasy novel could also work but I kind of like a space opera treatment better. 

Film Review: Sinners

A powerful example of layered storytelling that blends horror, history, and magical realism with meaningful social commentary.
 

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a uniquely crafted exploration of culture, connection, and spirituality contrasted against a relentless tide of oppression, manipulation, and cruelty. Using innovative film techniques, Sinners lures us in with an unsettlingly quaint setting and a group of memorable characters who create an allegory for the larger Black experience. The theatrical trailer for Sinners gives us a general overview of a pair of confident Black gunslingers in 1930’s Mississippi who build a juke joint and end up fighting blood-thirsty vampires. But that isn’t all the movie is about. Sinners is an example of layered storytelling which will mean different things to different people. Every scene, word, and reference is heavy with implications and unspoken undertones. The visuals are gorgeous but quietly haunting and the result is an emotional journey that leaves you wanting to rewatch it to discover all the layers of meaning. 

[MILD SPOILERS]

In 1932 Mississippi, Sammie (Miles Caton) is a likeable young Black musician, nicknamed “Preacher Boy” because his protective father Jedidiah (Saul Williams) is the pastor of the town’s very small Black church. Sammie and his father review the scriptures (which Sammie knows perfectly) for the next day’s church service but Sammie is anxious go into town with his older cousins, Elijah and Elias, nicknamed Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in a dual role). Smoke and Stack are back in town after an adventurous stay in Chicago. Sammie is starstruck about their time in Chicago versus their country town, but Smoke confirms that Chicago is just as racist and dangerous as Mississippi, and the twins would rather deal with the devil they know in their hometown. Smoke and Stack decide to build a juke joint on the edge of town so the Black residents can have a place to enjoy themselves in peace. They buy a slaughterhouse from a smooth-talking racist but are determined to open the place that same night. In a cleverly filmed sequence of scenes, the twins encounter and gather various characters needed to help open the place on short notice. In the process, we learn the backstory of each character, including old musician, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) who is hesitant to join them because he thinks a Black business won’t survive. In a hypnotic scene, Slim tells a horrific tale of exploitation and cruelty while sounds from his memories float around him. We also meet smart-mouthed Cornbread (Omar Miller), who works as a field laborer. Two of the stores in town are run by Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) and her husband Bo (Yao), so Smoke hires them to provide supplies for the new place. Stack had gifted Sammie a guitar, and Stack and Delta Slim are both amazed when they hear the stunning way Sammie plays and sings. They also encounter another singer Perline (Jayme Lawson), with whom Sammie is infatuated although she is married. Stack runs into his demanding ex-girlfriend, Mary (Hailee Steinfield) who is white but has some Black ancestry and feels close to the town’s Black community. Meanwhile, Smoke asks his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) to help with the cooking at the new place. Annie understands the supernatural and uses her knowledge to create protection for the twins and she and Smoke revisit their grief over the loss of their baby daughter. But things take a turn when an ancient Irish vampire, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), arrives, fleeing a trio of sharp-eyed Choctaw vampire hunters. Remmick senses the magical power of Sammie’s talent and targets Smoke and Stack’s place. As the evening becomes more dangerous we see how each of the main characters responds to the arrival of a new kind of oppression.

Michael B. Jordan is intriguing in his dual roles as Smoke and Stack, and the entire cast delivers compelling performances. Sinners is not a perfect story and, at times, characters make confusing choices that seem inconsistent with who they are. But it is a powerful example of unique filmmaking that blends horror, history, and magical realism with meaningful social commentary. There are so many thematic elements and symbolic components that viewers may need to see the film several times to catch everything. From a blues jam across the centuries to reciting the Lord’s Prayer while fending off a vampire attack, the film literally gives you a little bit of everything. A few themes particularly stood out. 

Family Relationships

Although the brothers have similar mannerisms, Smoke is more pragmatic and grounded. He is concerned about achieving success through money and power; he is closely acquainted with grief through the loss of his daughter; and he understands true sacrificial love through his connection to Annie. Stack is more lighthearted, reckless, and more compassionate to those who can’t pay the full price. Despite their differences, Smoke and Stack are intensely loyal to each other and they are both protective of Sammie. In a brief but crucial scene, Stack talks about his violent father and asks Sammie about his relationship with Jedidiah, but Sammie confirms his father does not abuse him. We also see a playful scene between Sammie and his mother as they begin the day. Despite his giftedness, both Sammie’s father Jedidiah and his cousin Stack warn Sammie not to pursue life as a blues musician. Jedidiah warns that if you dance with evil, one day it will follow you home. Stack orders Sammie to find a respectable community to settle in and leave the dangerous living to sinners like him and Smoke. 

Economics as Power 

The field workers are paid with wooden tokens which can only be used at the general store. When some of the juke joints customers pay with the wooden tokens, there is a difficult conversation between Smoke who wants real money as payment and Stack who wants to let people have fun and Annie who wants to show compassion for the plight of the exploited Black workers. Despite Stack and Annie’s desire for flexibility, Smoke knows the lack of money is unsustainable and he understands that the larger problem is the manipulative payment which is designed to indenture Black workers and hurt Black businesses. Similarly, in an earlier scene, Smoke takes a moment to teach a young girl how to negotiate a proper salary. 

Literary Symbolism 

The film is filled with archetypal characters and symbolic places: the complementary brothers, the reliable, spiritually attune wife; the angry, selfish girlfriend, the adulterous wife, the wise mentor musician who has seen suffering, and Sammie, the gifted chosen one, who turns out to be the true center of the story. Racist salesman Hogwood (David Maldonado) and slick-talking vampire Remmick are parallel characters, artificially polite, manipulative, and lethal. The juke joint becomes a rebellious center of culture built in a slaughterhouse where the blood has been scrubbed away but the memory of death remains imbedded. In key scenes the doors of the slaughterhouse/juke joint are compared to the doors of the church. Remmick wants to take Sammie’s talent, noting that he once had his land stolen from him. Remmick uses truth mixed with lies to seduce his victims. Sinners has two post-credit scenes and begins and ends with a specific song of encouragement. The music in the film is stunning, and each performance tells its own story. The title of the film gives us a layered meaning of “sinners” as rebellious, independent, broken, cruel, conquering, fearful, and universally all of us who must live with real-life horrors that rival the symbolic horror of the murderous vampires. 

Taking Risks 

A core theme of the story is whether to be bold with your talents or whether to play it safe. That answer may seem simple, but Sinners reminds us that those who are talented become targets for aggression and exploitation. Ultimately, the message of Sinners is finding a path between the extremes of devastation or the safety of hiding. Sinners has echoes of the “Parable of the Talents” where rewards are given to those who take risks with the gifts they are given. It’s a hard lesson for those who want to pursue “goodness” by playing it safe.

Of course, there are many other important messages in the film. And there are layers of meaning that make the story more than just another vampire story. Using unusual film techniques, clever storytelling, and heavy symbolism, Sinners gives us a complex tale that will keep viewers talking about it for a long time.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights

• Thoughtful visuals and music
• Traditional vampire violence contrasted with unique symbolism
• Memorable, layered storytelling

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Book Review: Seven Against Thebes by Stephen Dando-Collins

Stephen Dando-Collins’ Seven Against Thebes brings the original and once ubiquitously famous story to new audiences and readers

Seven Heroes, coming together to face a tyrant and his forces. You think you’ve heard this story before, or watched it.  Seven Samurai. The Magnificent Seven. And many variants.  But most of those stories (with one major exception, which I will discuss later) have the Seven coming together in defense, defending a group of innocents against an incoming force.  But the original story of seven heroes coming together is a somewhat different story. A story of a king wrongly deposed by his brother, and managing to gather a force of champions and soldiers to assault the city he once called home and to gain his birthright back. A city that in modern day is not as famous as Athens or Sparta, but was, once, their equal...

This is Stephen Dando-Collins’ story in SEVEN AGAINST THEBES: The Quest of the Original Magnificent Seven.

Once upon a time, 2500 years ago, the story of Polynices and his fellow Champions was one of the core stories of Greek History and Myth.  The Iliad and Odyssey you, reader, probably already know. And you know that even beyond those two texts themselves, the stories and myths of the Iliad and Odyssey had been adapted in plays, stories, and other works in Ancient Greece and Rome, and of course, all the way up to today. 

The story of the Seven Against Thebes was, for the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the co-equal of the Iliad and Odyssey, once inspired numerous plays and other works based on the events. The Theban Cycle was once as big a deal as anything by Homer. But while the Iliad and Odyssey have proved immortal, the story of the war against Thebes lost its luster and cultural consciousness except for it’s origin point, and the general idea of a band of heroes fighting together (which Kurosawa and Sturges would bring, and flip from offense to defense).  Dando-Collins’ goal here is to bring the original story back to light, for new readers and present a story whose original is perhaps unjustly obscure in a new and modern light.

The author takes a strictly historical fictional tack in the novel right from the beginning of the story. While a lot of the plays and fiction written around these events in the time of the Greeks and Romans had the action replete with Gods and Monsters and the like, Dando-Collins takes a tack that the characters certainly believed in the Gods and act (often very strongly) on their religious beliefs, Zeus, Athena, Hera and the rest of their family do not appear on stage at all.  

So where does the story of Seven Against Thebes begin, in Dando-Collins’ retelling? Well, as I mentioned before, this is the part of the story that you almost certainly know.  Who has not heard of the man who, unknowingly, slew his father and married his mother?  Yes, the start of the story of the war against Thebes begins with none other than Oedipus.  Just why Oedipus did these things are presented in a Historical fictional point of view. While in the original sources, Oedipus was cursed by the Gods to do all this, it is in the end a series of tragic circumstances, and it all begins with a chance encounter on the road. Oedipus, who has been raised far away from his birth home as a foundling, gets into a deadly encounter with his father (not that he had a clue who it was) and proceeds from there to Thebes, the populace unknowing that he killed the King of the city. But they do know he is a big damn hero and so they marry him to the widowed Queen Jocasta, who is indeed his mother, their blood relationship unknown to either at the time.1

I can hear the record scratch. Big Damn Hero? Hero of what? Well, it turns out you may not have realized it, but Oedipus did defeat a monster, or so he claimed was a monster, in a riddling contest.  A monster called the Sphinx. And yes, the classic riddle whose answer is “A Man”.  Again, given the historical fictional perspective, Dando-Collins speculates that the Sphinx was just a woman who was a dangerous robber, nothing more, not that anyone knew that. Defeating the Sphinx is certainly more Heroic than a single female bandit, right?  (Later on, during the actual war, Dando-Collins has a couple of soldiers argue whether the Sphinx was real or was, in fact, just a bandit)

So, Oedipus and Jocasta ruled Thebes for a time, until drought and famine had them seek answers from the Oracle of Delphi as to why and how to solve it.  The results of that led to the two finding out the long buried truth about themselves and what had happened. Oedipus blinds himself and flees Thebes. 1 This leaves Oedipus and Jocasta’s two sons, Polynices and Etoceles. They decide that they should share the throne, ruling in alternate years. In a move that everyone with the sense of a dazed dormouse should have seen coming, the moment Etoceles takes the seat, he banishes his brother. 

And so the Seven Against Thebes gets its defining motivation. Polynices winds up at the court of King Adrastus in the city of Argos.  Along with another royal exile from a different city, Tydeus, he cools his heels for a while, but is always dreaming of the chance to go and wrest control of the city from his no-good brother.  Finally, a plan is hatched by Polynices and Tydeus to get their thrones back, by finding and gathering a group of companions, going together to liberate Thebes, and then go on to liberate Calydon on behalf of Tydeus. (And Adrastus, who would get lots of prestige by having the two cities beholden to him for his help, sees this all as a good investment in money and manpower)

As you can see, Seven Samurai, the Magnificent Seven and its kin usually have our Heroes defending the weak, training the helpless and playing defense for an incoming force, but the original source text is all about an assault on Thebes. L.R. Lam and Elizabeth’s May SEVEN DEVILS, though, does take inspiration from the original source text, having their heroes go on the offense against an oppressive Empire. And the former Heir to the Empire is one of the Seven, continuing the theme of having someone connected intimately to the ruler as part of the attacking party.  

But there is a note of heroism in fighting against a corrupt space Empire in Seven Devils, that Seven Against Thebes, as told by Dando-Collins, lacks. The reasons why the Seven get recruited and join Polynices’ quest to become King of Thebes are varied but are relatively mercenary--be it in terms of material wealth, or glory. This does have the knock on effect, I think, for a modern reader like me to sympathize with the Seven a little less than I would with a more modern tale. Polynices got a raw deal, to be sure, thanks to his brother, but this is not an altruistic campaign by any means for any of the others. 

When the actual marching and fighting occur, Dando-Collins, who has written on ancient armies and combats, really does shine. He looks at the logistics of marching and the terrain the army has to traverse, and the set pieces of the conflict. He shows a mix of individual combats a la the Iliad with army actions on a larger scale as the forces led by each of the Seven face off against the Seven gates of Thebes. He goes into loving detail on how Thebes was arranged and defended and the heroism on both sides of the conflict (and also side quests!) plays out. It was especially, here, that I could start to see what Classical Greeks and Romans saw in the story. War, reverses, combat, heroism, tragic deaths, pathos, and much more. It’s excitingly and engagingly written. 

Especially good is how the battle plays out. It’s a method much copied in film, because it works.  If you have a group of opponents on each side, you pair them off, so that you narrow the wide screen to a series of one-on-ones. The Seven do this, by each Gate in Thebes getting a defender to hold off the member of the Seven assaulting it.  It will surprise you not at all to find that, for example, thjat the gate Polynices assaults is defended by his brother Etoceles, himself. 

There is also another bit I got to thinking in reading this. If you remember your Iliad, there were funerary games held for Hector after Achilles slew him. Here, in the course of the battles and conflicts, we get a couple of high profile deaths, and funerary games to match.  The sheer joy and exuberance the participants have in the funerary game make it clear to me that this is how the Ancient Greek Olympics must have surely started--it started out of funerary games that eventually decided to become a regular thing, without needing a funeral to have an excuse to hold them. 

The other takeaway is when this book takes place in the timeline of Greek history/myth. Given that several of the children and immediate descendants of the Seven are present at Troy, this takes place in the generation before the Trojan War.  Theseus is contemporary to the Seven. One of the Seven is the son of Atalanta, the Huntress of the Calydonian Boar. If we mix myth and history for a moment, the Seven are the penultimate crop of heroes in Greek Mythology. After them, we get the Trojan War and the end of Mythic, Heroic Greece. Mythic Greece fades away into real history.2  Perhaps since they are the second closest to real history and also are less myth-touched than earlier generations of heroes like Heracles, Bellerophon, and the like, the Seven were and are more relatable as real people by readers and storytellers alike. 

If you are looking for a mythic, magic, here, this is not the rendition of the story that you want. Dando-Collins is relentlessly materialistic, attributing everything to men or to chance, and the Gods and magic play no part in his story. He fashions this mythic story into historical fiction of the first order, readable, immersive and a great look at larger than life characters and their epic and immense struggle.  This is source material and inspiration that more authors could mine for their own ideas. 

And if you want to learn more about Thebes, the city that was neither Athens nor Sparta but just as important, back in the day, let me commend to you Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, by Paul Cartledge. He does briefly touch on the Theban cycle events before going on to written history of the city.

--

Highlights: 

• Epic storytelling grounded in the real.
• A real spotlight on a story whose details have faded from public consciousness

1. This is too big a digression to avoid putting elsewhere than a footnote, so here goes. The Oedipal complex has nothing to do really with Oedipus. He had no idea he killed his father, and married his mother. And as I said in the main text, once he and she find out the truth, it is with horror, revulsion and repulsion that this truth comes out, not any sort of secret desire like in Freud. Oedipus’ story is of tragedy of circumstance, not any sort of lusting after one’s parent. 

2. And yes I am sort of thinking of Niven’s The Magic Goes Away, here. 

Dando-Collins, Stephen, SEVEN AGAINST THEBES: The Quest of the Original Magnificent Seven. (Turner, 2023)

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

A step somewhat outside of the author's usual métier... but plus ça change for Leigh Bardugo, it seems

Luzia is a maid in 15th-century Madrid, a poor girl with Jewish heritage trying to hide from the attention of the Inquisition in already hostile circumstances… and it's made only worse by the fact that she has something more to hide: Luzia can do magic. Little charms, taught to her by her aunt, things that help around the house—unburning the bread, mending things that have broken. But little things could be enough to put her in big trouble. So Luzia keeps it all under wraps, until a slip-up means her mistress catches on. Under pressure, knowing the trouble scrutiny could get her into, Luzia is forced to use her magic to help her employers grasp for better social standing, and from that everything spirals out, bringing her to the notice of those with power to harm her, harm her aunt, and affect the power balance of the whole country. She is forced to compete to serve the king with her skills, and walk a dangerous line of pious, Christian mysticism, hiding who she is, where she came from, and the realities of her magic.

As a blurb, it sounds a little… pat. The "magical competition" angle is hardly underdone in fantasy, after all. But in the reading of it? It actually works. And I think there are two reasons for this.

Firstly, the choice of setting. 15th-century Spain was, to put it bluntly, not a fun time for quite a lot of people. Shit was brutal. And when your central character is someone trying to hide their Jewish heritage from the Inquisition during the worst of it? Well. And Bardugo never shies away from that. She does her best to give us a real sense of what that might feel like, what life might be like. Luzia's day to day is grim and hard, and especially early in the book we get a lot of her musing on memories of her father and the life he faced—not even necessarily one of pointed, deliberate oppression, but the simple cold, awful reality of living in a time where there was no care for people like them, where a slip in circumstances could mean death, where an illness could mean the end of everything. Luzia, we come to know very quickly, is keenly aware of the precarity of her position in the world as a poor person, as a woman, as someone with something to hide from the Inquisition. And having all that grounding laid out so well, so clearly, gives us a really good position to build from when we get into the complexities of Luzia as a person, when the choices she makes begin to contrast with what she ought to do, what she knows is sensible but cannot bring herself to settle for.

Secondly, the pacing and the tone—we don't get to the competition aspect of the story for a good while, so we're bedded into the world, the characters, the reality of it, and we've had time to acclimate to the far more serious and thoughtful vibe that this is going for, compared to many magical competition stories. It's not an action adventure, despite the events of the story fitting that pattern. And the thing that pulls it away from that is the writing, and Luzia's perspective, the way she sees and thinks about the world. It's too real, too thoughtful, too complex—angry and determined and ambitious and fearful and regretful and naive by turns. And because the writing is so closely bedded into her thoughts, that perspective comes through in the tone, making it all the richer.

Because Luzia is, for the most part, an exceedingly well-written character. She has a complexity to her that sells her as a fully realised human being, grounded in, but not wholly bound by, the constraints of her setting and situation. Luzia wants more, when she dares to let herself hope for it, and we cannot help but hope for it with her, even as we see the risks it involves.

And the writing is genuinely lovely. Bardugo focuses in a lot here on descriptions of place, of texture and food, and the little things that build up to a full picture of a real life. Cloth and clothes and scents and lights and movements, temperature and embodiment in the moment. All of it gives us little links into that setting that Bardugo has worked hard to craft, without ever feeling the need to shout about it or go into heavy exposition.

So, focusing on that, on Luzia and her characterisation, on the setting… it seems like a well-told historical novel with some magical elements thrown in, right?

Well. The bit where it gets tricky is that there's another strand to this, another thread of the supernatural that messes things up a little. Because the powerful man whose attention Luzia's magic brings to her master and mistress? He's not a stranger to the supernatural. He already has someone in his employ who has his own expertise and backstory, his own angle. In and of itself, that would have been fine, especially as it gives us some grounding in magic in the world outside of the tight restrictions of what Luzia herself can plausibly know. The problem is that he's a dark, sexy, grumpy man with an extremely chequered and/or dubious past that haunts him still, an archetype Bardugo cannot seem to quite leave behind, especially not as a love interest.

In the novel the blurb sounds like this is going to be, Santangel fits right in. Feared assassin rumoured to have demonic powers? Grumpy but with a sympathetic streak for Luzia? Absolutely, bang on the tropes. But for the novel it began to seem like we were getting? The thoughtful, historically grounded one that cares about a realistic portrayal of 15th-century Spain and the perspective of someone in Luzia's position? The complex character study, giving us someone whose pragmatism, changeability and hunger for a better life are both incredibly sympathetic and full of foreshadowed pathos? He feels like an off note, a character from a different story altogether, dragging us away from complexity and into something altogether more trite.

In the moment of reading, this is easy to skim over. The prose is good, the story moves at an easy pace, and there are some genuinely stunning romantic lines sprinkled throughout, as well as enough of a growing unease within the story, a sense of impending doom, that you cannot help but push through to find out how it's all going to shake out. Santangel's slowly melting heart, Luzia's increasing hunger for life and connection, they make sense in the moment, caught up in the emotion.

But when you look back after the fact, when the book begins to settle in the memory, that off note becomes more apparent. As the memory of the prose and the details fade, what lingers is this strange relationship, this strange foray into the far more typical fantasy repertoire in a book that is striving to break slightly less trodden ground. It's a call back to other Bardugo work, in a book that otherwise feels like a foray into new things for her.

Don't get me wrong, I have enjoyed other Bardugo. But the tropes that work in Shadow and Bone, or even in Ninth House, both of which are quite different but still quite traditional fantasy stories, do not quite land here. The Darkling or Darlington fit their settings in a way that Santangel never seems to quite gel into this one.

It's an interesting contrast to another book set in the same time, with Jewish perspectives, that I read recently: The Pomegranate Gate by Ariel Kaplan. On the face of it, that is a story that goes far more into traditional fantasy realms, with magical portals, fantastical places and people who aren't actually (or fully) human at all. But it has a coherence to it that The Familiar doesn't quite manage, and never lets the fantastical run contrary to the historical, instead having them genuinely work together towards the aims of the story. In some ways, The Familiar is a more ambitious work, striving for a greater closeness of perspective and embedding in the realities of the setting; but by having that single discordant trope, it never quite hits those goals. The Pomegranate Gate meanwhile knows exactly what it wants to be and does it with élan, and feels all the brighter and richer for that consistency.

Ultimately, The Familiar does feel more grown-up than some of Bardugo's other work, a foray into greater realism of setting, greater closeness of character, greater awareness of a complex, rich world putting its feelers through all aspects of the story, but it just does not linger in the memory in the way that Six of Crows or Ninth House does. It's good, it's an enjoyable thing to read, and it has some genuinely lovely prose at times, but it's just missing some of the magic. I hope it's a stepping stone. Because if she does something like this again, and just goes that little bit further with it? All the ingredients are there, and could make something truly special. We just need to leave the spectre of the hot, morally dubious man where he belongs. Or at least try to bed him into his setting as much as the protagonist (or as much as he beds the protagonist—wahey).

--

Highlights: lovely moments of description, absolute banger romantic lines, genuinely complex protagonist

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Bardugo, Leigh. The Familiar [Penguin Books, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Review: Three Fires

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

Sometimes it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we are living in a period of unique chaos, of unprecedented trouble, of totally new ways of driving ourselves and our societies completely, utterly mad. As a history buff, though, you look upon your acquaintances’ social media posts with a combination of bemusement, wry amusement, and a deep despair that calls to mind George Santayana’s famous quote. We are all too tempted to go “here we go again,” a response that both belies our reading and can lead to a callousness that breeds apathy towards those suffering in the present. Today, I’d like to draw attention to a recent historical novel that seems particularly attuned to such moments, a story of an early modern culture war that was much more fiery than those today.

That book is Denise Mina’s novel Three Fires, about the bonfire of the vanities, the massive burning of the riches of the city of Florence after a fanatical uprising led by firebrand preacher and proto-Protestant Girolamo Savonarola in 1494. His seizure of power comes as a reaction to the gross violations of Christian virtue by the Catholic Church in the period, such as the infamous debaucheries of Alexander VI or the widespread sale of indulgences. Reading enough about the medieval church, you begin to see why so many people saw this institution as one totally severed from Jesus and his lowly followers, and why they wanted something to replace them. It also came at the heels of so many miserable wars; in this period, the whole of Italy was divided into a spangle of city-states, often fighting one another and often allying with one power or another (France, Spain, the Papacy, the Holy Roman Empire) and just as often being invaded by them (just before Savonarola takes power, the French attack Florence, and during his childhood, depicted movingly in the book, we see a war between Italians in all its savagery). You can almost feel the pulse of Italian nationalism taking form, if only as a desire for a reprieve from it all, to be the invader rather than the invaded (such was the fate of Libya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Albania, and Greece).

Three Fires is a short book, just shy of a hundred and fifty pages, and if you’re dedicated you can read it in a single sitting (I did). Historical events like these may tempt a writer to go for a James Michener-esque door stopper, but Mina wisely economizes her writing here. She writes the book as a character study, a deep inquiry into the soul of a man whose ultimate goal was to save souls, and purge sin wherever he saw it.

The book moves at the pace of a thriller, surprisingly so given how deeply character-focused it is. In every scene, there is something of great importance, societal importance, religious importance, but also psychological importance. The infernos that are lit to expunge the corrupt church are written with such intensity you can practically feel the heat, and the scenes of war are some of the most visceral I’ve ever read. Mina made the inspired decision to write this book, like her previous book Rizzio, using almost entirely present tense, propelling the narrative along here with electric force. There’s a gravity here that most thriller writers can’t hope to match, and it is an exhilarating experience.

Girolamo himself is convincingly drawn. He is a firebrand, a zealot of a kind disturbingly familiar today. He is rejected in love (in the novel, although my understanding is that this is based on an account that is held to be dubious by historians - in any case, it makes a great story) at the altar, the worst place to be rejected in that way, and then he throws himself into the church after seeing his home city ransacked by invaders. Unlike so many careerists (a problem that afflicts any sort of powerful institution, doing so here in a way that reminds me of many Communist parties) in the church, he truly believes. He demands that the church militant live up to its lofty ideals, and is distraught when they refuse to do so (for those curious about the Papacy in this period, I recommend the relevant sections in John Julius Norwich’s tome Absolute Monarchs: a History of the Papacy). He becomes furiously aware that the Dominicans, the monastic order which he ultimately joined, used their emphasis on poverty and individual salvation to launder the reputations of cruel elites. He learns the different types of priests, and only so many of them are in this job for things other than to serve the Lord. He becomes a cynic at first, for a cynic is a disappointed idealist, but he channels that anger into an incandescent rage that sets all Florence ablaze.

It’s hard to put Savonarola in today’s political terms. He was, in some sense, a populist, demanding that the poor be cared for. But he was no liberal, mandating strict adherence to a draconian interpretation of Christian scripture. He insisted that women be kept at home, he hated any art that was not religious, and he utterly despised the Jews of Florence. His hatred of what he perceived as a depraved, fallen world, culminates in his most famous act, the burning of art, fancy clothing, non-religious literature, and anything else he detested in the bonfire of the vanities. Mina’s portrayal of the man, in all his dysfunction, all his personal misfortunes, all his jealousy, all his theological pedantry, and all his searing misanthropy, reminds me of John Ganz’s theory of ‘creep-loser’ fascism, although he lived centuries before Mussolini (and would have hated the latter’s open promiscuity and hatred religion, even if he eventually cozied up with the church later in his rule). He is a reject, angry at those who rejected him, and in some sense wants nothing more, or nothing less, than utter revenge on them. He does so by striking at the very core of their legitimacy, their alleged connection through the apostles all the way back to Jesus Christ himself. It’s not for nothing that Martin Luther was inspired so much by this man.

There’s a very particular narrative choice here that ramps up the novella’s relevance to contemporary political issues: the use of a third-person omniscient narrator who has no issues with breaking the fourth wall. The narrator refers to current culture wars directly, and explicitly compares the savagery of the Italian Wars of this period to the Vietnam War (an aside: if anyone is interesting in reading in more detail about how wars in Europe were fought in this period, I highly recommend Furies: War in Europe 1450-1700 by Lauro Martines), a comparison that gets more appropriate the more you know about both conflicts. It’s a choice that is not particularly subtle, but it feels appropriate; the rest of the book is written in a maverick enough tone that it feels only natural. It’s a very odd way of telling a story like this, but I swear it well and truly works here.

Three Fires is an electrifying read. It brings history to sordid, zealous, furious life. It does so through the focus on a figure, Girolamo Savonarola, that feels too strange to be from a novel, with too big a personality to be conjured from an author’s mind. Fortunately, Mina did not have to make up Savonarola, so she could focus her creative energies on telling this story with the verve of a thriller and the cunning of a crime story. You’ll wish there were more to the story here; all I can say is, if you liked this, read Rizzio. I’m not sure I can get enough of her writing now.

--

The Math

Highlights: the perfectly brisk pacing

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.