Love Artist, Jane Alison

Book Review: Well let me start off by saying I am very picky with my books, if they dont catch my attention in the first few chapters then I will not finish it. When I picked up this book I did not want to put it down, it catch my attention in the first few pages. I love the Jane Alison describes her chatacter. She goes in depth, so when you are reading it you can acually picture what that character really looks like or the place that she is describing. This was an awesome book and I would recommend this book to anyone. It is in the era when Emperor Augustus and the time of Jesus Christ.

I love this book so much that I want to buy it to have on my little book shelve!

Book Synopsis: Little is known about Ovid's life in exile in the first century A.D., and only two lines of his acclaimed Medea survive today. In this strong debut novel, Alison reimagines Ovid's sojourn on the east coast of the Black Sea, where Emperor Augustus, in the middle of a campaign to restore morality to his new empire, has banished the poet, displeased by the success of his Loves and The Art of Love. Here Ovid meets Xenia, a wild-eyed young woman who lives in isolation. The only literate person in her community, Xenia acts as town mystic, casting spells, healing the sick and telling futures. Ovid, who admits he believes in Amazons, with "their strong sweating thighs clutching galloping horses, wild howls coming from their parched, cracked mouths," is eager to be stunned by the "fishy, monstrous, unreal." He imagines the jealous, stormy Xenia to be his Galatea and sweeps her back to Rome, where she unwittingly becomes the muse for the lost Medea, his darkest work. From Alison's depiction of a trio of gossips at a patrician's dinner party, "dark eyes flying from one to the other like torches," to her description of an evening walk in Rome freighted with the knowledge that thousands of animals are "denned beneath the city's streets until they were let out, half starved, to devour terrified criminals or be speared in the emperor's shows," she demonstrates familiarity and ease with her subject; and her historic detail is never pedantic. Even those unfamiliar with Ovid and Roman history will delight in this tale of romantic intrigue, rife with blood, jealous rage and the consciousness of human frailty.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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