
Botille is a wily and charismatic peasant, a matchmaker running a tavern with her two sisters in a tiny seaside town.
The year is 1241; the place, Provensa, what we now call Provence, France—a land still reeling from the bloody crusades waged there by the Catholic Church and its northern French armies.
When the matchmaker finds the mystic near death by a riverside, Botille takes Dolssa in and discovers the girl’s extraordinary healing power. But as the vengeful Friar Lucien hunts down his heretic, the two girls find themselves putting an entire village at the mercy of murderers. (Summary and pic from goodreads.com)
My Review: I
chose this book for my book club in kind of a blind draw. The way our library
book club sets work is that they have the longest list ever, and then there’s a
somewhat confusing calendar on another page, and then you’re somehow supposed
to figure out which books are available that you actually want by toggling
through the two of them, trying to match up what you want verses what’s
available. If this doesn’t sound complicated then I haven’t done it justice. I’ll
often just start by trying to see what’s available and then decide if the book
is something I want to choose, which is what I did this time. See, my book club
is full of women near and dear to my heart, some of my best friends that I have
had these ten years living here in this neighborhood. It started as part of a
church group, though, and although we’re no longer that, many of them are quite conservative and very
conservative readers, so it’s not like choosing Fifty Shades of Gray is an option. At all. Not that I would ever
read that trash. But also—I just want to be careful. I don’t want to be that
person who picked the book with all the raunchy scenes and unnecessary
language. It’s not like they’re prudes, they understand that sometimes books
have some language, but it’s an audience where I want to choose a good book for
them that is on the clean side. (Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
Leave them in the comments!) Our book club has been going for more than ten
years now so you can imagine that we’ve covered quite a few books. Much of the low
hanging fruit has been picked.
When
I came to The Passion of Dolssa on my
toggle fest for the perfect book club book, I was happy that it was already on
my “To-read” list. That makes things easier. From there I do lots of info
gathering and reading other reviews and Wikipedia, etc., to make sure that I
know what I’m getting us all into. Not only do I not want to have a book that
would make people uncomfortable, but I also REALLY don’t want to waste people’s
time (including my own). Most of the women are gracious enough to read the
book, and even if they don’t read the whole thing, most of the time they’ve
read at least some and can talk about it. Having a really stupid book is just a
waste of everyone’s time and makes for a lame discussion.
I
am happy to report that I am very happy with my decision for this book. I think
it has a lot of great attributes that make it an excellent book club book:
1.
It’s
well-written. Sucky writing, no matter how good the story, just sucks. This
writing was beautiful and although it was written for a YA Fic audience, it
didn’t feel dumbed down or trite like I think some books in this genre teeter
on the edge of.
2.
The
story was very interesting. It was in-depth and featured many well-developed
characters. Although the book is long, it is still a relatively quick read and
I didn’t have anyone complain about the length (which will happen if a book
happens to be too long to read in a month for some people’s liking). The story
was engaging and even had some surprises and twists in it, which was nice.
3.
The
book had a hint of magic, but not too much to turn off those people who are
really against fantasy. In fact, it was up to the reader to decide whether it
was magical realism, magic, or something entirely religious. This made for some
great discussion in my book club, especially considering our religious
background.
4.
Which
brings me to an essential…this made for some great discussion in our book club.
We talked longer about this book than we have any other book in a long time. I
had a list of questions that I had gathered from various places, but there was
also just a lot of discussion and hashing out details. Part of this is,
admittedly, because we are an LDS (Latter-day Saint i.e. Mormon) book club (in the
sense that we are all LDS, not that we only read LDS literature), and so these
types of religious happenings were a very interesting topic for us to delve
into. If you are LDS you’ll know what I mean when you read this book—there’s a
lot to discuss.
5.
The
female characters are really cool. There are some great male characters, too,
don’t get me wrong, but this book is based on real-life female mystics that
lived during the Middle Ages. The author had done a lot of research into the
original journals and first person accounts of miracles that were performed and
what happened. I love me some historical fiction, but it’s so fun when it’s
based on true historical facts and real people.
I
really enjoyed this book. I had planned on reading it myself sometime, but I am
so glad that I read it in a book club so that I had other people to discuss it
with. I have, in fact, recommended it to other people as well in the hopes that
we can discuss it. As a religious person I just found it really fascinating,
and also engaging and well-written. I highly recommend it.
My Rating: 4.5
Stars
For the
sensitive reader: There are some minor incidents of language and acknowledgment
of sex (and in the afterward there is some discussion of how the female mystics
would write about their devotion in an almost sexual manner, although this was
never discussed). I was fine reading this book in my book club.
3 comments:
I read this a while ago and loved it. I'm glad to see it was a book club book!
I know this is an old post, but I am also a member of an LDS book club and will be discussing this book this coming week. Any tips on what kind of questions you asked?
The thing my book club liked about it was comparing her religion and our religion, what was similar and what wasn’t, and how looking at it from the outside is similar to maybe how someone would like at our religion from the outside. We enjoyed this book! I’d love to hear how it goes!
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