The Book : The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer.
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| The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer |
The Plot, in 20 words or less: A semi-psychic neurosurgeon struggling with her historian brother's death becomes obsessed with finishing his study on the Plague in medieval Siena.
Why I Liked It: This book is meticulous in its world building, obviously well researched without shoving it in the reader's face that times in medieval Europe are not what you think. Happily, the descriptions of the customs and setting of medieval Italy were used for the purpose of building the character's experience and situating her struggles rather than feeling like an essay on how things worked in Italy in the 14th century.
I also found myself so pulled in to the medieval characters worldviews I cringed at times when the main character judged other's actions from a twenty first century perspective; that was how masterfully Winawer was able to draw me into the inner world of medieval Italy.
Things I didn't like: the rape scene seemed extraneous, exploitative of a woman's pain without any real purpose of building the plot other than to character build the man.
Maybe you just don't like rape scenes because they're too icky for your delicate constitution: True in general, but still I find that authors like Rivers Soloman managed to write rape scenes without being exploitative. Soloman portrayed the horrors and the impact of systemic violence against women without the scenes feeling objectifying.
Unfortunately, in portraying the rapist's reactions to the girl's pain, Winawer forced the reader to also see the victim through this dehumanizing light as well. Icky; and yes, I realize that was the point. But this is my review, so I'm free to say I didn't like that part and didn't feel it had a strong enough purpose in the book to be worth the vicarious ick I experienced through reading it.
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