cover image LUCREZIA BORGIA

LUCREZIA BORGIA

John Faunce, . . Crown, $22.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-609-60974-3

Her contemporaries painted her as an incestuous, conspiring villainess. History has deemed her a hapless political pawn. Now screenwriter and first-time novelist Faunce allows Borgia to speak for herself in this extravagant first-person narrative of Borgia's life in late 15th-century Italy. The child of Pope Alexander VI and a former whore, Borgia is separated from her mother at an early age and raised in the Vatican by her imperious, corrupt father. Her arranged marriage to Count Giovanni Sforza ends abruptly as Giovanni flees Rome for his life (a victim of the pope's ruthless political maneuvers) just as her love for him begins to blossom. With her virginity declared "miraculously" intact, Lucrezia is forced to marry again, this time to one of Italy's richest heirs. As her brother Cesare and the Borgia family name gain political influence, Lucrezia comes to fear her sibling, all the more so after she and her husband, Alphonso, are viciously attacked by assassins in Cesare's employ. Cesare's subsequent actions incite her to even the score. Faunce gives Borgia the voice of a bitchy but self-possessed modern teenager ("What was I thinking? The hell with Cesare. The hell with my impotently sentimental, girly tears, self-pity and dramatization"), which has the stylishly funny appeal of a show on the WB network. It's not as effective, however, for anchoring a historical epic; the political intrigue and scandals tend to run together, narrated in the same relentless pitch of high drama. By the novel's end, when Borgia is in self-imposed exile in a convent, readers may feel like they could use a rest as well. (Mar.)