Dante's Daughter

I had to read a book for summer reading and I came across this one. I decided to give it a try because I am a huge fan of the Victorian type era whith romance and independence and I wassurprised that I liked it so much because I thought it would be all abotu the society during those times. I found it a bit boring in certain parts but overall, it was good. Give it a try.

What a great novel for young adults and on up. Effortless writing of beautiful clarity. Richly evocative and historically accurate details of life in pre-renaissance Florence, Siena and Paris. Vivid characterizations of stubborn, likeable Antonia and her family, including her famous father Dante. All these combine to give us a great window on the milieu surrounding the writing of one of the world's great masterpeices (Dante's Divine Comedy). But it is the human interactions, especially between Antonia's parents, and Antonia's own timeless struggle to know herself and her place in the world (though it is at the same time a struggle beautifully representative of her time) that make this book glow with the pure color and clarity of a painting by Duccio or Giotto, artists Antonia lived among. I can't wait to pass this book around. If only I'd had it years ago to introduce middle school students to Dante's world--the depiction of the Guelphs' and Ghibellines' ferociously intertwined enmity would have been priceless in itself.

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.