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2018 | Fiction & Poetry
The Pumilio Child is a dark, unsettling thriller that challenges the perception that Italy during the Renaissance was cultured and refined. The day-to-day reality was surprisingly barbaric.
Ya Ling’s cultured life of privilege in Beijing is cruelly cut short when she is abducted and shipped to the slave market in Venice. When celebrated Renaissance artist Mantegna sees her chained to a post, although his finances are perilous, he digs deep and buys her. His initial intention is to paint her exotic beauty, but he soon moves her into the harness room for pleasures of a more private nature. Ya Ling has two ambitions, to ruin Mantegna, then to escape her brutal and sordid life in Mantua and return back to her family in China. However, Mantegna’s latest commission, two huge frescos for the ruling Gonzaga family, make him invincible.
This gripping story is interwoven with a subplot introducing a bizarre and vicious practice that took place during Renaissance times. It was so corrupt and disturbing it has been wiped from history.
Judy McInerney
(Author)
| Published by | Unbound Digital |
Historical Fiction
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Ya Ling is admirable calm and stoic through all of her trials and tribulations, and eventually work as a respected healer, as her family taught her back in China.
The author really makes you feel for the characters in her novel - pity and later pride for Ya Ling, and hatred for some of the less virtuous male characters. It's a book that reflects the times very well: men, and men in the church especially, hold all the cards. Women are held in very low esteem. And women who are in any way different from the accepted norms are in danger of the ecclesiastical courts.
I read this on 'The Pigeonhole', a social reading platform, and really enjoyed the whole experience.