MADDALENA AND THE DARK

Two girls in an 18th-century Venetian music school are drawn together in a story of love, ambition, and dark magic.

In 1717 Venice, the noble Grimani family—reeling from a recent scandal—decides to send 15-year-old Maddalena to the prestigious all-girls music school Ospedale della Pietà, hoping to preserve her chances at marriage. As she learns her fate, while riding a gondola on a “vast lagoon,” the discontented and recalcitrant Maddalena sees an otherworldly creature approach her in the water. “And the thing asks Maddalena, without speaking: What do you want? And the thing asks: What will you pay for it?” Later, at the Pietà, Maddalena finds herself drawn to violinist Luisa, and the two develop an intimate relationship. When Maddalena learns that the reserved and modest Luisa is more ambitious than she lets on, the two begin making wagers with the mysterious forces that lurk in the canals and lagoon. Moody and sumptuous, the novel has many delights in store for lovers of beautiful sentences and lush scene building. The relationship between Luisa and Maddalena is seductive, exciting, and suspenseful—especially as jealousy begins to color the quality of Maddalena’s wishes. However, this suspense doesn’t quite carry through the entire novel, which suffers from uneven and often frustratingly slow pacing. The grim conclusion, which feels unsatisfying and overwritten (“Now is nothing. Now is exploding, exponential stars; the water and the water and the water”), also falls disappointingly into bury-your-gays tropes. Still, with its enchanting gothic tone, the novel does manage to pull the reader into a subtly mystical world and makes for an unsettling and sometimes haunting experience.

An unevenly paced, atmospheric story with a supernatural twist and queer undertones.