Sins of the House of Borgia

January 24, 2011
A young Jewish woman is drawn into the splendor and corruption surrounding the court of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, in Bower's debut, a slick historical soap opera. After Esther Sarfati is baptized and becomes a lady-in-waiting to the widowed Lucrezia Borgia, the pope's illegitimate daughter, she is attracted to Lucrezia's seductive and cruel brother, Cesare. Esther becomes ensnared in a web of deceit and betrayal as Lucrezia is sent in a political marriage to the powerful Alfonso d'Este, heir to the dukedom of Ferrara. Determined to pursue a romance with the elusive Cesare, Esther is increasingly drawn into the schemes and passions of the Ferrara and Borgia families. While Esther's blind love for the careless and usually absent Cesare strains belief, the sheer grandeur of the papal and Ferrara courts, and the spectacle of the Borgia and Ferrara siblings' rivalries and revenges form a glittering take on one of the most notorious families of the Italian Renaissance.

February 1, 2011

A surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of the Renaissance clan who gave meaning to the term "Machiavellian," narrated by a lady-in-waiting to Lucrezia Borgia. The Showtime drama based on the book premiers April 2011.

Esther, who left Spain after Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the expulsion of the Jews, followed her father to Rome, losing her mother on the journey. Her father, a moneylender to the Vatican, arranges, for his daughters' protection, to have her join the court of Lucrezia, one of Pope Alexander VI's many illegitimate noble children. The Borgias require that Esther be baptized Catholic. Later, Lucrezia's dashing, unscrupulous brother, Duke Valentino, known as Cesare, sardonically nicknames Esther "Violante" (promise-breaker). Despite the Duke's dangerous reputation as an assassin and womanizer, Violante is violently attracted to him. He toys with her affections, but when Violante follows Lucrezia to the province of Ferrara where she is to wed its ruler, Duke Alfonso d'Este, Cesare stays away. Lucrezia settles into her relatively happy marriage to Alfonso. (It's her third politically expedient union to be negotiated by the Pope: Previous husbands were shed, one fatally, when they no longer served Alexander's interests.) Violante exchanges romantic confidences with her fellow lady-in-waiting Angela (Lucrezia's cousin), who has affairs with two of Alfonso's brothers. On a visit, Cesare deflowers and impregnates Violante. He's long gone, besieging other Italian city states and perpetrating all manner of treachery, when Violante gives birth to a son, Girolamo. Lucrezia, though her love for Cesare is more than sisterly, appears to share in Violante's hope that Cesare will propose marriage. Much plotting, dungeon-languishing (but, oddly enough, no poisoning, at least not of humans) later, this ponderous tome lumbers to a close. The confinement of the point of view to Violante narrows the scope of the novel to her observations of the pageantry of life among the great, and although her descriptions are lush and detailed, the Borgias and their enemies emerge as mere figments of history, not fully fleshed characters.

Like a tapestry of the period, decorous but two-dimensional.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)