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Jun 21, 2018 Raymond Elmo rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Let’s begin on a busy city street. Scout around for a homeless person. Skip the sly panhandlers. No, find the type you usually work to NOT see. Some sad creature wearing all their clothes at once. Someone desperate to lie down, but can’t stop swaying and pacing. Desperate to articulate what can only be mumbled and shouted to the street lights. Consider them. They have something you lack. Besides a shopping cart full of newspaper and old string.

That crazy homeless person has a patron saint. Speci Let’s begin on a busy city street. Scout around for a homeless person. Skip the sly panhandlers. No, find the type you usually work to NOT see. Some sad creature wearing all their clothes at once. Someone desperate to lie down, but can’t stop swaying and pacing. Desperate to articulate what can only be mumbled and shouted to the street lights. Consider them. They have something you lack. Besides a shopping cart full of newspaper and old string.

That crazy homeless person has a patron saint. Specifically, St. Margaret of Cortona (1247 – 1297), who is assigned to watch over tramps and the homeless, particularly the crazies. Our Lady of the Those Who Talk to Street Lights. While we who share the mortal sidewalk work to avoid contact with her charges, Margarita hovers above, ministering best she can, in Heaven’s usual mysterious fashion.

How did a farm-girl peasant of 13th century Italy become quantum-entangled with a schizophrenic talking to a 21st century street light? Ha; that’s a story which would make a street light blink. A love story, of course.

Writing an historical novel is a challenge. Twice the usual work is demanded. One must keep true to the facts of war and weather, prayers and obscenities, buttons and breakfast. Putting the reader to bed at night in a peasant farm-house with parents and siblings and goats. In the morning, the reader must shit in a chamber-pot, nod in fearful courtesy to a knight who can gut a peasant for meeting his gaze. How does a man smell when he returns home from a 30 day march of penitence?

Of course, if you go all James Michener with the historical detail you drown the story in a sea of fact. Some stories are too good to be turned into cast-of-thousands epic sagas. Ms. Garlock keeps true to historical background; but keeps Margarita’s story up front.

Margherita is an intelligent girl in a time strange to us; yet still dimly comprehensible. A ‘distant mirror’, as it has been called. Violent and cruel, yet filled with calls to mercy and love. Passionate yet practical. Religious thought is the ocean through which each human fish swims. If one tells Margherita’s story honestly, that spiritual reality must be kept. No sly wink of disbelief is allowed, lest it become a Monty Python episode. The tale of Margherita and Arsenio must include God as the 3rd wheel, no matter how they clasp and clutch. No matter how we scoff.

“Poverella” meets the challenge of depicting medieval life, and yet presenting a moving and entertaining story. Behold a heroine believable as any soul on the 21st century sidewalk, for all that she is so far away from our definitions of worth. Being believable, you will want to thump her on the head at times. The closer she becomes to that saintly street-light glow, the farther she gets from us. We are watching what would make an intelligent, passionate woman into a world-rejecting saint. And it is a logical progression. Margherita is a woman looking for a complete love. Her passion for her lover Arsenio dominates her life; and yet by the physics of the 13th century is black with sin and shame.
Inevitable but that someone honest in what she feels, brave in what she dares, will pursue the only ‘pure’ love a medieval mind can imagine. Sainthood, penance, self-denial, working tirelessly to comfort the poor.

By my practical standards she became one with the homeless guy talking to the sky. And yet, St. Margaret founded hospitals, comforted the sick and dying and friendless, the voiceless. Moved the world just a tiny click more towards valuing those that we work to not see.

As a rule, I avoid historical novels. I want fantasies of alien worlds, heroic glories. But I am overthrown by “Poverella”. It’s a love story, a window to a strange land, a call to reconsider basic human values. A life ending in glorious light. Things I most want in fantasy novels.
Bah. Next I’ll be talking to the street lights.
. ...more

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Mar 28, 2019 Samantha Henthorn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The unpicking of a holy legend. I do enjoy a historical fiction every now and again, Poverella reminded me why. So cleverly written, we meet Margherita as a child living with her farming parents. As she grows up she meets with life's battles, bereavement, romance, and complicated family dynamics influenced by power and religion in thirteenth century Tuscany. There are so many themes in this book that are easily relatable guilt, mental health, denial, motherhood, love. Sometimes, it is hard to un ...more

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Oct 07, 2014 David Rose marked it as to-read

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