Books: In the Company of the Courtesan, by Sara Dunant

So, if you want a good laugh, take this book to work and when some asks you what the book is about tell them the truth:  it's about a high-classed Venetian prostitute and her dwarf side-kick Bucino.  Gets them every time.

That's pretty much the long and "short" of it, HA HA!.  The book opens with Fiametta and her dwarf comfortably situated in Rome, with an army of angry Lutheran protestants at the gate.  The army enters and the 1527 sack of Rome begins.  Fiametta swallows her finest jewels and and escapes with Bucino to Venice, where Fiametta is originally from.  She moves back in to her mom's old house, though her mother is long dead and it is now cared after by a sour old hag, Mergosa.

The two must immediately try and set up shop, but Fiametta's beautiful hair was shorn by Lutheran zealots (I know,  I know, those words don't really go together but it seems once upon a time they did) who did not take kindly to her profession, and she must grow it back and get over other various injuries and the ravages of the road.  They enlist La Draga, a blind apothecary and rumored to be a witch, to help her get back into health.

And they make it.  They really do.  Their trade is set up by allying (blackmailing) with a Roman poet who has ended up in Venice and has ties to Court.  They move into a nice house, and Bucino takes care of the business side of things.  But Fiametta falls in love with a young man of the court, and it threatens to undo all...

Enough.  It had its moments, but there were numerous plot twists that didn't really go anywhere, and were basically only used to set up the next twist, all of them minor.  It's like watching a bad movie, and you hope that there is some major plot twist that makes it all worthwhile, but it never really comes.  This book was better than that, it had some wonderful moments (the sack of Rome is horrifically described and there is some good stuff where Fiametta crosses path with Titian), but in the end it didn't really go much of anywhere, and it fell flat for me.

Sarah Dunant would scoff at me and ask me if I could do better.  Maybe given two months, a quiet house on a lake, a typewriter, a box cigars and crate of vodka, I could.  But for now I must merely give her joy of her success, and beg her pardon for my opinion.