7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a historical novel should be., May 30, 2005
This is a beautiful book - a lot of fun and good food for thought. The prose is excellent. Since little is known about Dante's daughter Antonia, the author is free to tell her own story and she uses this freedom well. At the same time, she captures the flavor of a far-off time and place, where owning three dresses is amazing luxury for a small girl and it takes months to travel from Italy to Paris. We also get a feel for such places as war-torn Florence where houses are fortresses, a decadent Provencal court where lords play ball with oranges, and the peace and loveliness of a community of beguines outside Paris. I'm sure this is all meticulously researched, but it adds to the story rather than detracting from it.
Incidentally, you may not know what a beguine is - I didn't either before reading this book. It's just one of the many things I learned quite painlessly. They were women who took reversible vows of chastity but not poverty and lived in a walled village where they engaged in small businesses - a shocking idea in an age where choices for unmarried women were few and stark.
Women's lives are a major theme of this book, yet without any anachronistic imposition of modern feminism as so many historical novels have. What Antonia and her female relatives think is very probably what women of that age did think, but could not write about, since they were usually illiterate or too busy to write.
We also learn a great deal about Antonia's famous father Dante Alighieri, his writings and his political career. It makes me want to read his Divine Comedy. I also realized for the first time what a bold idea he had in that book, writing about a number of people he had known and who had died quite recently, and assigning them to Hell, Purgatory, or Paradise. Nowadays I suppose their families would sue him. It's amazing he didn't have any more enemies than he did.
Antonia is an artist, too, but with paint rather than words, and gives us a window on some of the great painters of the end of the Middle Ages in Italy, who would soon give birth to the Renaissance.
This book also has a lot to say about broken families, and relationships that break down because people of good will fail to understand each other.
All in all, I recommend this book highly both for teenagers and adults.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful writing, but story went on too long..., July 3, 2008
As someone who loves history and historical fiction and who was eager to learn more about the great poet, Dante, I find my feelings after reading this book, at best, ambivalent. The book description was certainly right about the author's richly detailed rendering of the story of Antonia Alighieri. Stylistically, Heuston's writing is beautifully artful and fluid, so fluid that, regrettably, I found myself jarred on more than one occasion when an un-artfully modernized phrase unexpectedly leapt off the page at me just when I was most entranced. She also had a tendency, particularly in the early chapters of the book, of scattering Italian words in the text without definition or even sufficient context to hazard a guess at their meaning. I found this a bit annoying and pretentious, but thankfully as the story wove on, this happened with a good deal less frequency and more sympathy for the reader in adding definitions and contexts.
Dante's daughter, Antonia, tells the story of her life in a first person account. Despite the book cover's description of Dante as an "inattentive, difficult father", for me, the book glowed most sympathetically whenever Dante appeared on the scene. Though frequently forced away from his family by unwisely chosen political allegiances, he always came across to me as a man who loved his family, treating them all with great kindness and tolerance, more than I felt was reciprocated by his wife, sons, and daughter, Antonia. (Though his sons appear briefly in the book, they are never prominent enough to capture a reader's attention in any true depth.) Admittedly, for much of the book, Antonia is a child and young woman who might be forgiven for being so focused on her own feelings that she only rarely seems able to reach beyond them to empathize in any form with a "difficult father" who nevertheless displayed touching instances of love, attention, and encouragement for her in return. If others tried to turn her from her heart's desire to paint, Dante, in this book, was not one of them.
The amount of detailed research that went into this book, while to be admired, ultimately threatened to overwhelm the story for me. I felt the last few chapters particularly began to drag, as I began to wonder if we would ever reach the end of Antonia's "life's journey".
A "life lived in full" became, for me, a life lived much too full, nearly to the point of unbelievability (and sadly, knocking on the door of boredom) to me by the end of the book. In my opinion, the story would have benefited by a less broad, and more focused, approach in the telling. And ultimately, I found small evidence that the answer to the questions posed by Antonia at the beginning: "Had my journey made me wise? Had my secret griefs made me strong?" were "Yes".
To her credit, Heuston did successfully stir my interest to learn more about the "real" Dante. After reading a few of her chapters one night, I stayed up till 3 AM, researching him in some of my medieval encyclopedias. I suspect I will be buying a non-fiction biography of him soon.
Dante's Daughter is billed as a Young Adult book for grades 10-12. As a way to acquaint high school readers with pre-Renaissance Europe, this would probably be less painful than a dry old school textbook. But for entertainment, it will take a serious young reader to read such a seriously earnest book all the way to the end.
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