From Publishers Weekly
In a sensuous 17th-century saga set in German Catholic Cologne, Learner (
Quiver) transports readers to a time when studying the ancient Kabbalah could prove deadly for a young Jewish midwife. Ruth bas Elazar Saul is the headstrong daughter of the chief rabbi of Deutz, Cologne's Jewish ghetto. She undertakes the forbidden course of mystical study, her Sephardic mother's legacy, before absconding to Amsterdam to escape an arranged marriage. There, Ruth acquires the contemporary midwifery skills she will combine with her sacred learning, and upon her return to Cologne she delivers wealthy burghers' babies using new lifesaving methods, earning a reputation for more than medical genius. Word of her skills travels quickly, and as the Spanish Inquisition stretches its tentacles to the Rhineland, Ruth is arrested for sorcery by the sadistic archbishop Carlos Vicente Solitario, whose persecution of her is fueled by a stymied youthful obsession with her mother. Ruth's keen intelligence and bravery in prison win her an ally, Canon Detlef von Tennen, who falls passionately in love with the "Jewess." The two marry, and Learner has readers rooting for the survival of their unlikely alliance. This steamy, riveting page-turner is also a paean to the triumph of a woman's spirit.
(Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
In the tradition of books about strong Jewish women, which includes
The Red Tent (1997)
and
Sarah (2004), comes this story of Ruth, a woman of the Middle Ages who fights against the prejudice that surrounds her gender and religion. The daughter of an influential rabbi in Cologne, 23-year-old Ruth is a highly skilled midwife, but she is also the obsession of Solitario, a Dominican inquisitor. Spurned by Ruth's mother, he is determined to destroy the daughter and uses Ruth's practice of kabbalah--seen as a form of Jewish magic--to launch his attack. Ruth is even more vulnerable to the inquisitor after she falls in love with Detlef von Tennan, a churchman struggling with his loyalty to Catholicism. Fans of sweeping historical dramas will be enthralled by Ruth's story; remarkably, Learner writes with equal power about the intensity of Ruth's spirituality, the passion of her forbidden love for Detlef, and the horror of the torture she suffers at Solitario's hands. This is the kind of all-consuming novel that readers hate to see end.
Ilene CooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
