Great read
The Brightest Star by Emma Harcourt, HQ
It is 1479 and with plague swirling in the city, cloth maker Vincenzio Fusili has arranged for his wife, Giulia, to have their first born in a grand villa in the hills above Florence, safe within the walls of the Medici country estate. He is hoping for a boy, an heir to the empire he is building. The birth is tricky and when Leornarda Lunetta is born crippled, Giulia immediately shuns her, telling her friend Elisabetta to take the swaddled screaming bundle to the convent. “The day was to be my glory and it has ended most monstrously,” Giulia cries, exhausted and desperate. But when husband Vincenzio arrives soon after the birth, he immediately falls for his baby girl, accepting God’s blessing.
Cut to 17 years later and Luna, now an inquisitive young woman, has concocted a romantic picture of her mother in her head – Giulia actually died hours after Luna’s birth – and is devoted to her learned father, who remarried and has indeed grown in eminence.
Luna is a captivating heroine, excited by learning, brave and bold and yet also vulnerable. Her malformed leg has actually gifted her a freedom rare for her gender, and in Renaissance Florence Luna is in her
