[close]
Fifteen-year-old Dolce has always known she is a freak. Despite the love of her mother, who named her after the Italian word for sweet, she can’t help but feel lonely and hideous, ridiculed and avoided by the other inhabitants of the tiny Venetian island of Torcello. She is a giant compared to them, with a ridiculously small head and grotesquely long fingers. That is, until she’s so driven by heartbreak that she leaves the island to brave an outside world she has always been taught was full of persecution and torment. As it turns out, Dolce is not the monster she has thought herself to be, and the world she finds herself in—that of the glittering medieval nobility of Venice—is more subtle in its torments. Though Napoli’s complicated plot sometimes leans heavily on contrived revelations, her exceptionally clever and well-researched arrangement of fact and possibility gives one of fairy tale fiction’s most irredeemable villains an intriguing backstory. This emotional tale is a surefire winner for fans of fractured fairy tales.
