The Birth of Venus
Sarah Dunant · 2003
Renaissance Florence, a young woman who loves art and falls in love with a painter. Dunant writes historical romance with the care of a scholar and the heart of a novelist. Alessandra's story is a love story, a coming-of-age, and a meditation on beauty in a world that wants to suppress it. Intelligent, sensuous, underrated.
The case against
Alessandra thinks like a twenty-first-century woman costumed in quattrocento dress; her every opinion about art, marriage, and Savonarola lands exactly where a modern book club would want it. The painter she loves never even gets a name, which tells you how much he matters as a person rather than a plot function. Dunant's research is everywhere, sometimes audibly.
Romance · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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