read by Davina Porter
It’s 1686. Nella has traveled from her home in the
countryside to Amsterdam to join her new husband’s household. But when she
arrives, being the wife of a wealthy merchant isn’t at all what she imagined.
Somehow Nella has to learn how to be a proper wife and citizen, but she has no
idea how and nobody to help her.
She rarely sees her husband, who seems kind enough in his
way but takes almost no interest in her; his proud, cold sister is the one who
is really in charge of the household; and one of the servants is an insolent
keyhole-listener and the other is a foreigner. Nella is lonely, bored, and
cooped up in the imposing house almost every day, with no company but her little
bird, Peebo. Her few interactions with the burghers who should be her peers
leave her perplexed at best.
Then one day her husband brings her a wedding gift: a model
of their house the size of a cabinet. Nella commissions a miniaturist to create
tiny residents and furniture for the house—but soon finds that the miniaturist
seems to know a lot more about the goings-on in her household than she herself
does. In fact, everyone she meets seems to know more about her household than
she does. All these secrets lead inevitably to disaster, and then Nella really
needs to find sources of strength.
This is a gorgeously claustrophobic, twisty-turny book—Diana
Gabaldon meets Margaret Atwood. Highly recommend, especially if you like a
beautifully-researched period piece that doesn’t succumb to stereotypes. And
speaking of Diana Gabaldon, the narrator of the audiobook version is Davina Porter, who also narrated all the
Outlander books, and she is nothing short of amazing.
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