Quote from the book:“Life went on, despite all the dying.”
This book should more accurately be named, "The Hangman". While he does have a daughter, the story is mostly about the father. Set in Germany during the mie1600's, a small town experiences upheaval as several young children are found murdered. The common thread is that they are all orphans known for spending time with the town midwife. They all have the same mark on their shoulder. The town fears witchcraft and immediately arrests the midwife.
The hangman is assigned to torture her for information while the town waits for the proper authority to arrive to sentence burning at the stake. Our forward thinking hangman and his young physician friend must solve the mystery of what is happening before the town boils over in heretical unbridled accusations.
2)
In Girl Reading, the author imagines the stories behind seven portraits of girls and women reading. The portraits range in time from 1333 to a 2008 Flicker photograph to an imagined portrait set in 2060.
I picked up this book in my search to find a novel to discuss in November for my book group assignment. This book is not really a novel but rather seven individual stories that the author links together at the end. For each story being self contained, I was impressed at the sense of time and place each story provided, as well as all the subtle details woven in. Each story was so rich that I could not read more than one at a sitting. So this is kinda of a cheesecake book.... oh so good but you can't have a lot of it at once.
I enjoyed looking up the applicable paintings for each chapter.
The writer does not use quotation marks or any words like "he said" or "she said". By the end of the book I was used to it, but reading it at first was very disconcerting.
No comments:
Post a Comment