The Scribe of Siena

Starred review from March 13, 2017
Winawer’s debut is a detailed historical novel, a multifaceted mystery, and a moving tale of improbable love. When Beatrice Trovato’s brother suddenly passes away in Italy, she leaves her New York home and demanding work as a neurosurgeon to sort out his affairs and retrieve his research on the Black Death in Siena. What she doesn’t expect is to be pulled into his studies, as she compulsively attempts to complete what he started. Stumbling across fresco painter Gabriele Accorsi, who mysteriously seems to have painted her into his work, she finds herself physically transported across time into the 14th century, just before the plague strike. The vivid descriptions of the people, way of life, food, and other details of medieval Italy deepen the plot, making the book a truly immersive experience. The novel dramatically brings to life a period in Siena’s history that is still overwhelmingly neglected by historians—it is still unclear why Siena was ravaged by the plague in ways unseen in other Italian cities. Winawer has created a prodigious, vibrant tale of past and present that transports readers and fills in the historical gaps. This is a marvelous work of research and invention.

March 1, 2017
A New York neurosurgeon finds herself in medieval Siena facing a career change, plague, and true love.Beatrice Trovato, 33, is ripped from her surgical work by the untimely death of her brother, Ben, a historian who was researching a persistent mystery about his adopted home, Siena, Italy: why, besides misfortune, rats, and fleas, had post-pandemic Siena never quite recovered its prominence as a Tuscan city-state compared to its rival, Florence, which the bubonic plague also attacked? Taking a sabbatical from brain surgery, Beatrice moves into Ben's centuries-old Siena row house and sifts through dusty archives, intent on continuing her brother's quest. While in a church, perusing the journal of early Renaissance fresco master Gabriele Accorsi, she blacks out and somehow (the physics of time travel are not this novel's concern) wakes up in 1347 Siena. There follows an entertaining junket as Beatrice searches for the proper medieval garb (narrowly escaping the Sienese wardrobe police), enjoys the food (Ur-farm-to-table), and communicates fluently with 14th-century Tuscans using modern Italian (linguistic niceties are also not a concern). Her rare, for a woman, literacy skills land Beatrice a job as a scribe at Siena's Ospedale, the local monastery/hospital/poorhouse, where she copies Dante manuscripts, legal contracts, and other documents. She meets Gabriele, who's been hired to paint a religious mural outside her workroom wall. After he rescues her from a monastery fire, their very chaste courtship begins. Accorsi had already imagined her and painted her into other work, which she had puzzled over in the 21st century. When he takes her home to meet his family, they turn out to live in Ben's future house. Meanwhile a subplot reveals more about the enigmas Ben was pursuing--involving the Florentine Medicis. A trip to Sicily, where the plague begins, more time travel, life-threatening illness, and other trials, virtual and literal, ensue before the novel's questions, mainly involving personal lives as opposed to Back to the Future ripple effects, are answered. The realities of day-to-day existence in 1340s Europe are so viscerally represented that readers will readily accept the fanciful premise.

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Starred review from February 15, 2017

This first novel is a captivating portrait of medieval Siena as seen through the eyes of a 21st-century neurosurgeon. Beatrice Trovato attempts to re-create her late brother's research into the transmission of the Black Death in the mid-14th century and mysteriously finds herself living in the city months before the plague is set to begin its ravage across Europe. She is wrapped up in Siena's particularly severe encounter with the disease, and whether that virulence might have been somehow deliberate. As she moves from protecting her brother's legacy to experiencing it for herself, she falls in love with the medieval city and with an artist named Gabriele Accorsi. Running afoul of nefarious evildoers in both time periods, Beatrice is forced to choose between the life she knows and the place and people she has come to love. VERDICT This mixture of history, time travel, and romance with its hint of mystery will remind historical fiction readers of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander and Tracy Chevalier's The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Sf fans will recall Connie Willis's The Doomsday Book. Lovers of meticulously researched historical fiction and time-travel narratives will be swept away by the spell of medieval Siena.--Marlene Harris, Reading Reality, LLC, Duluth, GA

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