Recent Reads

Goa: Blood of the Goddess, by Kara Dalkey. This book is "fantasy" only due to the presence of a mysterious powdered substance which has apparently-miraculous medical effects. Otherwise, its setting is a fairly straightforward historical portrayal of Goa, the Portuguese colony in India, in the year 1597 AD. (In an afterword, the author briefly discusses the history of Goa, and acknowledges the librarian at the U. of Minnesota who helped with her research.)

The story follows several threads simultaneously. An apothecary's apprentice from England, taking passage on a ship bound for the East Indies, and finds himself entangled with not only a privateering captain and crew, but a far more mysterious woman and an alleged "sorceror" being pursued by a Portuguese warship. Meanwhile, a Special Envoy from the Grand Inquisitor of Lisboa has been dispatched to the colony to investigate strange doings in the Goanese office of the Inquisition. Heresies and corruption are rumored to be afoot.

The author's depiction of the "santa casa" of the Inquisition is frighteningly believable, especially as she takes care to show how its "tender mercies" are justified to a young and idealistic monk.

I noticed this book when I was looking at weeding candidates in the SF collection of Suburban Public Library. The book hadn't checked out in couple of years, but its title, with its allusion to an exotic place about which I had heard vaguely interesting things, attracted my attention. So did the cover painting, a glowing, golden-orange Richard Bober painting of a sailing ship approaching an Eastern city. I enjoyed the book enough that it's going back on the shelves. And I might just go out of my way to see that the library gets the second and third volumes in the story.