Week 8: The Passion by Jeanette Winterson

Another great recommendation from Emily! I'm a little late posting so I'm going to have to make up a week somewhere. Life happens.

Two characters with very different backgrounds share one common characteristic: passion. A peasant farmer turned Napoleonic soldier and a web-footed Venetian runaway wife cardplayer turned prostitute lead very different lives - one dreary and cold, the other hot and passionate, and somehow they find commonality in their own physical displacement and misdirected passion.

Most of the time I wondered what was real and what was fantasy; but truthfully, the book is peppered with so many interesting turns that I didn't care which was which! As I've mentioned before, I love historical novels, and although I don't know if there's any truth in what seems to be true, the writer wove a story so full of details that it could have been completely true - and it could have been total B.S.

In this book, fantasy meets history, and dreams meet reality, and characters live and breathe and jump off the page in vibrant colors.

Don't expect to read this in the company of small children, though... the story loses some of its magic when you have a lot of distractions, and I did have to re-read some parts.