Book #4 Completed! "The Birth of Venus" by Sarah Dunant

First off, before you read this let it be known that I am probably going to ruin this book for you so if you have not read it, and for some crackpot reason you plan on it, I suggest you move on....

With that out of the way, "The Birth of Venus" by Sarah Dunant highlights the dangers of judging a book by its cover. Well, insofar as the cover is attractive and the inside is full of crap. As you can see from the handy dandy picture that I have posted below, the cover contains pretty colors and part of a painting from the renaissance. It lured me to it at the local goodwill with its false promises and good looks. It was like when you go to the movies and see an awesome preview and are totally amped to go see a film and once you go, you find out all of the good parts were in the 3 minute preview that you saw. Depressing and disappointing.

Now, Sarah Dunant dedicates this book to her mother and her three daughters. Not that I am a prude or anything, but she uses some words in this book that I would never use and definitely not around my daughters or my mom. Plus she is British and I am still a bit annoyed at the two times they started wars with us. Go America!!!

The plot is bleh. There is this chick who lives with her parents in Florence and hates living at home, is oppressed, blah blah blah. She gets married to a much older guy who is a bit creepy (not that marrying a 16 year old is creepy enough when you are FORTY-EIGHT, but I digress...) in an arraigned marriage. Come to find out that new husband knows the family, in the biblical way, and....AND it's not his mom or sister he has been fooling around with....Its her BROTHER!!! Imagine her surprise at this nugget of knowledge! Anyway, she fools around with him anyway in order to try and have a kid and she fools around with some painter and he fools around with the brother (do you see a pattern?) and so on and so forth.

So she has a kid and there is a whole "Jerry Springer" feel about the situation because OF COURSE she does not know who her baby daddy is. Then hubby fakes is own death, runs away with the brother and she and her new daughter end up in some progressive convent for the formerly wayward but now are chaste. BUT THEN painter boy shows up (like 10 years later) and she is supposed to be a full on nun but they fool around anyway. IN THE NUNNERY!!

There was not one point in this book that I could not have just put it down or gave up and threw it in the fire. I only finished because I did not have another book and I was bored. Therefore, despite getting glowing reviews from actual literary sources, I give it a...

OH NO! The motorcycle fell off the kickstand!!!! (translation: zero VROOMS on the motorcycle awesomeness scale)

Next up: I have no clue because I never imagined I would make it through four books. Stay tuned.