Morbid Romantic

Book Review & Personal Blog

The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini (From publisher)
Sabatini debuts with a love story set against the backdrop of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, from its independence in the 1980s to the decline of democracy in the 1990s. Lindiwe Bishop is 14 when her neighbor, 17-year-old Ian McKenzie, is charged with killing his mother. Lindiwe’s shy, at the top of her class and from the first black family that settled in Bulawayo after integration. Ian is boisterous, a dropout and from the last white family remaining in the neighborhood. They only meet briefly before he is jailed, and when he’s released a year and a half later they strike up a secret friendship that largely consists of Lindiwe listening to Ian talk. Their friendship endures another hiatus—this one for 10 years—when Ian goes to South Africa, and when the two reconnect, Lindiwe is a spitfire. Subplots of varying interest—the question of Ian’s fidelity, whether one of Lindiwe’s friends is shacking up with corrupt officials—crop up, but most lack resolution or are abandoned soon after they’re raised.

Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon by Andrea Di Robilant (Paperbackswap)
Drawing on the letters of his great-great-great-great-grandmother Lucia Mocenigo, a Venetian aristocrat, di Robilant paints a vivacious picture of the Napoleonic age. The fifteen-year-old Lucia’s correspondence with her new fiancé, the nobleman Alvise Mocenigo, includes a glissando from formality to rapture that gives an idea of the narrative’s pitch: “My most esteemed spouse, my good father having informed me of your favourable disposition towards me, and having told me of your worthy qualities . . . I felt such agitation in my heart that for a brief moment I even lost consciousness.” Over the years, as Lucia travelled throughout Europe, this girlish enthusiasm was whittled away by a selfish, neglectful, and manipulative husband; on discovering, after Alvise’s death, letters from an impressive array of lovers, she filed them alphabetically by author. Back in Venice, living in an apartment where, she complained, rats were her only reliable company, Lucia became Byron’s landlady.

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