Helpful Score: 4
Took me a long time (like 80 pages) to really adapt to the writing style. There are many, many characters and their introductions are brief. However, I'm glad I stuck with it because it is an amazing, frustrating, scenic story. It is an historical fiction and really interesting.
Helpful Score: 2
Exciting and informative historical fiction. Good read.
Helpful Score: 2
A National Book Award winner. A good book, but very sad.
Helpful Score: 2
An unusual story, told from many perspectives but with great feeling. Very sad, too.
Helpful Score: 1
An amazing story - beautifully written and engaging!
Helpful Score: 1
A fine historical fiction set in the middle of the 19th century. Great characters and description of life in early Paraguay.
Helpful Score: 1
The professionals said that this book was artfully layered and that they loved all the characters in it. But to me, it felt haphazard and confusing...I started losing track of characters and halfway through the book didn't care about anyone anymore.
This is a National Book Award finalist written was a historical fiction that was fascinating. In 1851, the flamboyant son of the dicator of Paraguay meets a beautiful Irish courtesan in Paris. He brings her back to his country,she bears his children and lives through the ambitions, and devastating wars of that time. Since I knew so little of South America, this was like a history lesson,too. So well written you are drawn into the characters and environments
A wonderful novel, exhaustively based on original sources, given an absolutely magnificent reading by a brilliant actress, Lisette Lecat. If this were not a first-rate novel, it would still be well worth listening to just for the pleasure of experiencing a virtuoso performance by Lisette Lecat.
Similar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez
National Book Award Winner
a lot better then i thought!
the year is 1854. In paris, Francisco Solano begans his courtship of the young beautiful irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and a horse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Ascuncion and reigns there as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's dream that will ultimatwly ruin all of Paraguay.
From Publishers Weekly
Beautiful Ella Lynch left her native Ireland at 10 and married a French officer at 15; by 19, she is divorced, living with a Russian count and struggling to pay her embittered maid. Thus she's in prime shape to appreciate the quick and ardent attentions of Francisco Solano Lopez, aka Franco, the future dictator of Paraguay, when he spies her on horseback in a Paris park in 1854. Rich, generous and not unhandsome, he makes an appealing lover, and soon Ella is off with him to Paraguay, which he vows to make "a country exactly like France." The story unfolds through Tuck's elegant narration (she flits from one character's point-of-view to another in short segments) and Ella's impassioned diaries. The author's research is impressive (Ella was a real 19th-century courtesan) but never overbearing as she explores the life of a spoiled kept woman in a foreign land, as well as the lives, both high and low, of those around her. Established as Franco's mistress in Asunción, Ella bears Franco many sons, while Franco succeeds his father as ruler and acquires mistress after mistress. Tuck (Siam; Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived) weaves in the stories of Franco's fat, jealous sisters; a disgraced Philadelphia doctor; Ella's wet nurses; and a righteous U.S. minister, among many others, in a richly layered evocation of a complicated world. When Paraguay finds itself at odds with neighboring countries, the novel chronicles the various tragedies and defeats with a cool and unswerving eye. Tuck's novel may not be for the faint of heart, but it is a rich and rewarding read.
Beautiful Ella Lynch left her native Ireland at 10 and married a French officer at 15; by 19, she is divorced, living with a Russian count and struggling to pay her embittered maid. Thus she's in prime shape to appreciate the quick and ardent attentions of Francisco Solano Lopez, aka Franco, the future dictator of Paraguay, when he spies her on horseback in a Paris park in 1854. Rich, generous and not unhandsome, he makes an appealing lover, and soon Ella is off with him to Paraguay, which he vows to make "a country exactly like France." The story unfolds through Tuck's elegant narration (she flits from one character's point-of-view to another in short segments) and Ella's impassioned diaries. The author's research is impressive (Ella was a real 19th-century courtesan) but never overbearing as she explores the life of a spoiled kept woman in a foreign land, as well as the lives, both high and low, of those around her. Established as Franco's mistress in Asunción, Ella bears Franco many sons, while Franco succeeds his father as ruler and acquires mistress after mistress. Tuck (Siam; Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived) weaves in the stories of Franco's fat, jealous sisters; a disgraced Philadelphia doctor; Ella's wet nurses; and a righteous U.S. minister, among many others, in a richly layered evocation of a complicated world. When Paraguay finds itself at odds with neighboring countries, the novel chronicles the various tragedies and defeats with a cool and unswerving eye. Tuck's novel may not be for the faint of heart, but it is a rich and rewarding read.
