![]() Her husband, a legendary patron of the arts, commissions a portrait of his teenaged bride, to immortalize her beauty. ![]() The marriage, idyllic at first, is quickly doomed. The daughter of the powerful Duke of Florence, she is married off to her sister’s fiancée at age 15 after her sibling met an untimely death. In The Marriage Portrait O’Farrell poetically tells the tragic tale of the young Duchess Lucretia de Medici, wife of the Duke of Ferrara in 16th Century Italy. She’s done it again in her recent best-selling novel. ![]() She masterfully dips into an era, plucks out an obscure figure and breathes life into that person. And no author is better at it than Maggie O’Farrell. Historical fiction is one of my favorite genres. The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell It’s a modern American a retelling of Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” but dare I say it - better than the original. Sounds like a bleak tale, but Kingsolver’s skill, humor and affection for the people of Appalachia - she’s one of them, remember - make this one of the best novels of the year. That’s also Demon’s undoing as an injury and the prescription opioids that get him through the pain send him into a spiral of addiction. ![]() He ends up in a series of Dickensian foster homes but is ultimately saved by high school football. It just won a Pulitzer.ĭamon, nicknamed Demon, is a boy born into a modern world of poverty and addiction in a single-wide trailer to a barely conscious addict mother. How does Barbara Kingsolver do it? How does she pen novel after fabulous novel, filling them with unforgettable, endearing characters? I don’t have the answer, but I do know that her latest, set in southwest Virginia where Kingsolver lives, is her best.ĭon’t take my word for it. ![]()
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