Synopsis: Gabriella Mondini is a rarity in 16th century Venice: a woman who practices medicine. Her father, a renowned physician, has provided her entrée to this all-male profession, and inspired in her a shared mission to understand the secrets of the human body.
Then her father disappears and Gabriella faces a crisis: she is no longer permitted to treat her patients, women who need her desperately, without her father's patronage. She sets out across Europe to find where-and why-he has gone. Following clues from his occasional enigmatic letters, Gabriella crosses Switzerland, Germany and France, entering strange and forbidding cities. She travels to Scotland, the Netherlands, and finally to Morocco. In each new land she probes the mystery of her father's flight, and open new mysteries of her own. Not just mysteries of ailments and treatments, but ultimate mysteries of mortality, love, and the timeless human spirit.
Filled with medical lore and sensuous, vivid details of Renaissance life, The Book of Madness and Cures is an intoxicating and unforgettable debut.
Review: This was an interesting book, and a pretty quick read. From a historical standpoint, the author does a great job in showing what medical practices were in the different countries, and how women were treated in the age of the Inquisition. The reader sometimes gets ahead of the author, in guessing what is coming next, but then she gives you a few twists and turns, to keep you guessing. The dialogue keeps the story moving, as does the excerpts from the book that the character's father was writing.
If you like historical laced fiction, you'll like this book!
About the Author: Regina O'Melveny's poetry has been published widely in literary journals, garnering several prizes. She grew up at the edge ofpungent chaparral in La Mesa, California, and chose to enroll at Callison College--a school of International Studies at the University of the Pacific--almost solely based upon the fact that the second year would be spent in India. Thus began her many extended travels that would later inspire The Book of Madness and Cures, her first novel. She lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
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