Life As Carola — Joan Grant

The second of Joan Grant's "Far Memory" novels, Life as Carola gives a fascinating glimpse into life in Italy just before the advent of the Renaissance. Through Carola's eyes, we see the beginnings of modern theater, and the tremendous extremes between the life of nobility and the common man. Carola was the illegitimate daughter of an Italian nobleman, the Lord of the Griffin, in sixteenth-century Italy. Cast out at an early age, she joined a band of strolling players. In her short lifetime Carola gathers harsh experience of poverty, violence and bigotry softened by the friendships she makes on the road: with Petruchio, both jester and sage, with Bernard, the gentle strongman, and Lucia, the harlot who loves him, and with healer Sofia, whose fate warns Carola to keep quiet about her dreams of the Shining One who guides and comforts her.