The Stars Dispose
   MICHæLA Roessner
  1997 TOR Books, NY USA
   ISBN: 0812550145

 
 
   
  The Stars Compel
   MICHæLA Roessner
  1999 TOR Books, NY USA
   ISBN: 0312857551


The Befanini family is bound to the great house of the Medici by blood & oaths & through children born on both side of the blanket. When Catherine de' Medici is born, her young parents succumb leaving her an orphan in a family of power & wealth. Early years bring Catherine & the children of her wet nurse & wife to her family's Chef, close together as lifelong friends with unbreakable loyalty.

Together they must survive attacks of bands of bored youths roaming the streets, power plays by the great movers & shakers of that time & then the Black Death. Barely catching their breath the citizens of Florence get the word that the German emperor is marching his horde of barbarians toward them.

In the meantime, Tomasso, all of twelve years, faces his hardest task set to him by his teacher & father, the fabled Chef Gentile. Afterwards he must cross 16th Century Florence to deliver a cat heavy with kittens, letters & spices & receive, in return, a meeting with a young girl who will change his life, more letters & sewn goods.

If Tomasso's world is the great kitchens in the noble houses where bastards roam, heirs plot & marriages are made - Catherine's world is in the upstairs shadows, learning with her hand maid, Tomasso's sister, to survive attacks upon virtue & intelligence.

Without lingering, MICHæLA Roessner tumbles us into the mystery & magic of everyday Befanini life; into the teamwork & infinite details of creating feasts to set before their masters. Food as art, as medicine, as spiritual.

We meet a Cast of Characters both real & fictional during the City of Florence's apex when great families: fathers of popes & cousins to astrologers ruled the pretty city with a velvet clad iron fist both protecting & owning all of Catherine's & Tomasso's lives.

We also meet the legendary cats of the households with their distinctive markings & manners, lineage & rat catching skills both for the animal & human kind.

We become privy to the Occult: the second sight mirrors, the omens & the foretellings, the undercurrents that flow between households - between masters & servants.

With Rome fallen to both plague & barbarian, Florence is next in the path of the two headed monster & everyone is in turmoil: fleeing, plotting, cursing & worrying.

Tomasso keeps learning, carrying messages & hearing strange & dangerous whispered conversations, for no one notices a little kitchen boy who is growing into awkward adolescence.

In The Stars Compel, the second book of this trilogy, Thomas is coming-of-age, becoming a master sculptor of food & feasts & is now Catherine de' Medici's trusted Chef. In the Renaissance world of men & politics, food & the arts, religion & astrology, goddesses of the hearth & gods of the heart, orphaned heir Catherine must steer a safe passage between the power struggles of pope & power as well as the struggles between the Occult & Christianity.

I am in awe of MICHæLA Roessner's writing craft, she is a Mistress of the Woven Word. She has the skill to sketch before you a great feast, a magnificent sculpture, a dazzling spot of magic! I would disappear for hours into the worlds she has created, fed by her well chosen words, her authentic details & her breadth of view.

Lovely, lovely historical fantasy with just the right touch of verity to make fact & fiction seamless.

The Stars Dispose & The Stars Compel are the first two books of a trilogy. The Stars Relent is due out in 2001.

MICHæLA Roessner won the Campbell Award for best new writer of 1986 & her first novel Walkabout Woman won her the Crawford Award.

Do catch my Interview with MICHæLA Roessner of THE BRAZEN HUSSIES.
(08/20/00)

Rebecca