I Read Books: Ilario
Mary Gentle returns to the First History revealed in Ash: A Secret History. Ilario, a hermaphrodite from Tarraconnesis, wants to be a painter utilising the New Art. (This is 1420 so it’s perspective and stuff like that).
Unfortunately they’re enslaved in Carthage and their mother wants to kill them due to complicated political reasons. Ilario finds themselves travelling through the looking-glass First History Mediterranean with a Book Buyer (spy) from Constantinople (New Alexandria). There’s painting, and medicine, and fights and plotting.
It’s all enjoyable and clever and interesting, but somehow doesn’t spark to life for me in the way that some of Gentle’s other novels (Ash and 1610).
Read This: For superior and weird pseudo-historical fantasy
Don’t Read This: If you do not enjoy graphic descriptions of surgery, murder and painting.
Comments