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A beautifully-written story of a provincial French town in the late 14th-century. Our main character is Bonne, the bastard daughter of a woman who was said to have performed miracles. Twenty-two years later, Bonne finds herself as a nursemaid to a wealthy woman. When the town of Villanueve is besieged by the English, and the townspeople are starving, Bonne finds herself feeding most of them with her milk.
This is a strongly sensual book- but, oddly enough, it is not sexual. The act of breastfeeding is treated with matter-of-factness. Bonne is a fascinating character, and I enjoyed getting "inside her head" in this powerful book about love and longing during a time of famine and plague, at a time when it was a sin to be a dwarf or a Jew. We also see the viewpoints of some of the other major characters in the book.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Wonderful! An engrossing tale of a medieval wet nurse that follows her from an inauspicious birth into worthlessness to a lauded position in her village, where she has been and continues to be viewed by some with suspicion. Through dark and tangled forests, carefully maintained bright castle gardens, streets covered with thorns and excrement, and places spiritual and secular that are simultaneously consecrated and unholy, Susann Cokal has written a novel that uses archetypal figures and locations in a way that transcends symbolic confinement and creates a unique and often erotic world that is deeply rooted and alive. Her characters, especially the titular Bonne, are fascinating, psychologically complex, and so well developed that they remain conscious in your mind both between readings and after the novel ends, causing you to wonder about them and their current lives as one would think of a friend. This is a world that I will continue to hold in my mind and a book I will revisit often.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Fall back in time, before the Enlightenment, the Restoration, to the mentality that surrounded the Inquisition, when the Catholic Church was immolating heretics and unbelievers, when myth and witchcraft are as familiar as fervently whispered prayers. In 1357 France, a small village is overwhelmed on every front, long under siege by the English, threatened by the Black Death that is decimating cities and subject to the fickle judgment of an angry God. This is a world of poverty, where people live by their wits, exchanging services for goods, coin a precious commodity.
Shrouded in superstition cloaked in religion, Bonne Tardieu, daughter of Blanche Mirabilis (Blanche the Astonishing), ekes out a meager existence as a wet nurse, knowing that a patroness would change her world drastically. The illegitimate Bonne is used to life as an outcast, her once-sainted mother immolated in a church fire. Fate looks kindly upon Bonne, in the person of Radegonde Putemonnie, the town's wealthiest woman, who commissions Bonne as the wet nurse for her unborn child. Radegonde must carry this child to term in order to inherit her deceased husband's fortune, opening her opulent home to the wet nurse, providing for the breasts that will feed the coming baby.
In a starving village, the young woman is an object of intense scrutiny as she is plied with food to enrich her milk. The bountiful Bonne, in an effort to assuage the villager's envy, allows them to nourish their starving bellies on her milk. Bonne develops an attachment to the woman who offers her this island of security, but gossip prevails. Eventually Bonne is hailed as a saint when a Madonna appears, bearing Bonne's likeness. Unfortunately, the town turns against Radegonde, proclaiming her for a witch.Read more ›
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Bonne La Mere was a wet nurse who, history tells us, fed the entire town of Villeneuve, France, for weeks during a siege by the English in 1372. Susann Cokal takes the few snippets of information available about Bonne's life, and uses them to skillfully embroider her lush novel, Mirabilis. Cokal appears to have a firm grip on her time period, enough to thrust the reader into the sights, sounds and smells of medieval life. She's particularly adept at portraying the bizarre mix of superstition and faith that characterized medieval religious belief. The only false historical note, for me, anyway, was the supposition that Bonne, a poor girl and illegitimate to boot, would somehow have picked up the skill of reading and writing. That one was tougher to swallow than a heroine with miraculous breasts. The other characters in the book are strange and yet somehow believable. There's an ascetic sculptor with a penchant for self-flagellation, a manic-depressive dwarf, and a voluptuously pregnant noblewoman, all of them vying for Bonne's attention. Although I was prepared for just about any plot twist in this novel, the sexually charged relationship that develops between Bonne and her wealthy patroness struck me as somewhat gratuitous. It wasn't necessary for the plot, although my cynical take on the publishing industry tells me that it may have been necessary in order to get a manuscript about a dubious medieval saint into print. That, and the often impenetrable bits of narrative supplied by the dwarf, marred the book for me. Nevertheless, the novel is strangely compelling, and worth reading for the startlingly clear window that Cokal provides into another time and place.
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