Book Reviews
A magical novel.
Lisa Tuttle - Time Out
Audacious feats of the imagination. This rich and complex novel is both harrowing and compelling.
Nicola Humble - Times Literary Supplement (London)
Kathryn Harrison writes about the dark side of a woman's destiny with an intensity that makes you shiver.
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One novel I have not mentioned so far, one of the main narrative strands of which features a powerful, but doomed, love affair, is Kathryn Harrison’s A Thousand Orange Trees, which takes place in seventeenth-century Spain, at the height of the Counter Reformation. The twist in this tale, the insurmountable obstacle for the lovers, is the fact that one of them is a priest. This is a scenario which occurs in several modern romances, notably Colleen McCullough’s The Thornbirds, and is, I think, an area deserving of further exploration. The celibate priest is a fascinating variation on the classic theme of the wounded hero healed by the heroine’s love, as long as we think of love in earthly, erotic terms rather than divine love. The distinction, however, can become blurred, as in the many documented cases of visionary ecstatics, whose experience of divine love is often expressed in erotically charged terms.
Sarah Bower - Historical Novel Society
Harrison is completely at ease with the historical material, evoking with frightening detail the world of the Spanish Inquisition, whose prisoners reside, almost literally, in the bowels of Madrid. The Spanish court, too, is described with precision and colour, and its formality and restraint contrast strikingly with the splendour and exuberance of the French Court.... Maria Luisa loses every freedom at her arrival in Spain.... Her entrapment within the royal court is not at all dissimilar to Franciscaís imprisonment at the hands of the Inquisition.
Holly Davis - Deep South (New Zealand)