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Cry to Heaven - Paperback
$19.99
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Cry to Heaven
$19.99
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Is this book for you?
- Feels
- Atmospheric, Melancholy, Romantic
- Kind of story
- Historical fiction, Literary fiction
- About
- Revenge, Identity, Desire, Queer stories
- Pace
- Slow burn
- How dark
- 3 of 5. Dark, with real menace
- Romance
- A subplot
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Featured in our reading guide: Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles in Order (and Where the Mayfair Witches Fit)
Eighteenth-century Venice, and a boy is castrated to preserve a voice that will make him famous and unmake his life.
Shelf note: Anne Rice without the vampires, and maybe her best book.
Tonio Treschi is a Venetian nobleman's son with an extraordinary singing voice. His half-brother arranges for him to be taken, cut, and sent south to a conservatory in Naples, an act of family vengeance disguised as patronage. What Tonio becomes is a castrato: celebrated across Italy, sexually ambiguous in a way audiences find electrifying, and permanently severed from the life he was born to.
The novel follows his training, his rise through the opera houses of Rome and Naples, his affairs, and the revenge he spends two decades preparing.
No vampires here. This is Rice writing straight historical fiction, and it's among her best work. The research into the castrati is meticulous and unsentimental, and the central question, what you owe a body that was taken from you, gets a harder, stranger answer than the setup suggests.
Reader note: Contains explicit sexual content and depictions of mutilation.
Details
- Author: Anne Rice
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 9780345373700
- Genre: Historical fiction
Praise
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Daring and imaginative... [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.
The New York Times Book Review
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To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinning through the mind of time.
San Francisco Chronicle
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If you surrender and go with her... you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.
The Boston Globe
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